Search 38 woodworking forums at once

[Jon]

Here's a Google-powered Custom Search Engine I made to search through 38 different woodworking forums at once:

Click here to search 38 different woodworking forums at once

How do you like it? Would you use a similar search engine to search through many machining forums, automotive forums, or another kind of DIY forum.

[jjr2001]

I tried it and it works well. I did a google search on chuck and came up with 220,000 hits. Most of the hits did not have anything with the chuck I was looking for. Tried the new custom search you listed and got 33,000 hits and the ones I looked at all had something to do with the "chuck" I was looking for as applied to wood working. Very promising. Thanks for posting it and I think it would be helpful with machining as well.

Cheers, JR

[morsa]

It’s just wonderful.
By limiting the search to these forums, many useless results are eliminated, i.e. links to manufacturers or commercial pages, (which often show advertisements that expired long ago, but still appear on Google), blogs, extinct forums (i.e. foromimecanicapopular), etc. On the other side, we must be alert that it would be possible to miss some important results.
I'm afraid Homemade Tools Forum was not included in the list of woodworking forums.

[thoms_here]

Thanks! Anything that saves time with accurate and up to date info would be great! I would love to have one for DIY knives and knife making tools etc.

[jjr2001]

Well I just used google custom search to make a custom that searches only Homemadetools.net. Put in a search for wood and found that it is a great way to search Homemadetools.net for anything.

https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl...63:fkawiazmpiw


So the power here is that I can make a search of Homemadetools.net and a few other tool sites that I use (not that many) and have the best search for whatever I am looking to find.

Of course I will make one for model steam engines and model airplanes also.....

Cheers, JR

[morsa]

It works great, jjr2001. It might be an alternative to the search engine of the homadetools site. I do not know which of the two search engines could be more efficient.
My point is, alike woodworking, as stated thoms_here, if you are going to look for info in several forums about knives, you would also be interested in finding tools to make them.

[Jon]

Nice work jjr2001. The CSEs are pretty straightforward. They essentially duplicate the functionality of adding many different inurl: and site: modifiers in your search query.

So, for example, for UKWorkshop.co.uk, we know that all of their forum thread urls will contain "http://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums", so the CSE essentially adds inurl: http://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/* to the query, and we use the asterisk as a wildcard character. For a site like WoodturnersUnlimited, we can examine their url structure and see that an example forum thread url looks like this: http://www.woodturnersunlimited.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4800. That's even better, because we really ONLY want to search through forum thread urls. In this case, every single one will contain http://www.woodturnersunlimited.com/forum/viewtopic.php. So we include a CSE rule that looks like this: http://www.woodturnersunlimited.com/forum/viewtopic.php*.

Yes, HomemadeTools.net isn't included! I might put together a "General DIY Forum" CSE, and we would fit in there. But because we're not 100% woodworking, and I wanted a strict woodworking forum, I didn't include it. Knifemaking forums is a good idea too.

[morsa]

Yes, HomemadeTools.net isn't included! I might put together a "General DIY Forum" CSE, and we would fit in there. But because we're not 100% woodworking, and I wanted a strict woodworking forum, I didn't include it...

Thanks, Jon.
The criterion is clear; however, since this forum deals with tools in general, on condition that they are homemade, it covers many branches of industry, trades and crafts, and therefore, none of them would ever meet this criterion.

As you've said, in addition to this custom search for woodworking, many more could be done, i.e. for knife making, for CNC router, for 3d printing, for metal machining, for model making, etc., categories all of them addressed by this forum; however, under this criterion, none of these searches will retrieve the works published here, and that’s unfortunate.

An efficient search would be one in which: 1) all the results are useful (without “false positives”), and 2) without leaving aside potentially useful results (without “false negatives”).

What if including Homemade Tools forum in each one of these custom searches?

Isn’t it possible that it could enhance 2), without affecting 1)?

It’s just a thought.

[Jon]

Added HomemadeTools.net to the search results for this Woodworking search engine.

I'm still trying to decide which CSE to build next. I think I'm down to either knifemaking or machining; I'll need to review the available forums for both disciplines to make a decision.