How to (sort of) search forum with Google

Posted by: davidge on 27 January 2011

Here are two ways of searching the forum with Google - they are not pretty and will only show you pages as Google last saw them (which will be out of date by varying degrees).

Complete web search:

Go to Google and do your search (e.g. Naim CDX2).
When you see a result that links to the Naim forum (i.e. the last line of the result shows "forums.naimaudio.com/eve/forums...") click on the 'cached' link next to it (i.e. NOT the main result link).
Google will then display an unformatted version of the forum page highlighting your search terms.

Forum only search:

Go to Google.
Click on 'Advanced search'.
Fill in the search form and in the 'Search within a site or domain' field enter: forums.naimaudio.com
Do the search (click on 'Advanced Search' button).
You will now see only search results from the forums.
To view a result click on the 'cached' link on the last line of a result as above.

As I say not pretty, somewhat awkward and results won't be bang up to date - but may be better than nothing until the proper forum search is made available.

Personally I think it is shocking that we should have to resort to jumping through such hoops (and to get less than ideal results) as Naim should have ensured that search was there on day 1 and not released the new forum until it was.

Posted on: 28 January 2011 by Tony Russell
Hi, there is a shortcut for searching within a site using Google, for example to search Naim forums for 'New Forum Feedback' enter the following in the Google search field:

New Forum Feedback site:https://forums.naimaudio.com/ 

The basic structure is: search term text site:website address

In time Google will re-index the forum content so all previous posts will be searchable in this way.
Posted on: 28 January 2011 by davidge
Thanks Tony, I knew there was a shortcut as well but for the life of me couldn't remember it!

The important thing regardless is to click on the 'cached' link in the search results - if you click on the main link you will simply get directed to the new forum home page as Naim seem to have set up auto redirects to prevent accessing old forum pages.