Thursday, Oct 1, 2009    Text size: 

Tech giant Google has dispatched its web-indexing spiders to chronicle message board activity all over the Internet. If a topic has sparked many discussions, links to those web forums will appear on the first page of results.

“We hope this feature gives you a deeper view into the relevant content available on sites throughout the web, even when that content spans multiple pages or discussions,” a Google representative said on the company’s official blog. “At the same time, the main search results are diverse as always, so if you can't pinpoint a useful comment there's a list of relevant sites there to help.”

The message board search results will typically appear indented and after the third or fourth main result. As helpful as that sounds, Tom Leach, owner of ThatOneProgram.com and JayManCash.com, told XBIZ he was dubious of this new feature.

“I would say no, that will not be handy,” he said. “We don't want all the surfers to know everything, now do we? I’ll bet message board posts will end up pulling in higher ranking than our sites. And then this is really what we need the message board thieves that end up getting more traffic than they have already.”