[squarefoot]

I have no way to tell if this was deliberate or not, but personally I lost any respect and trust in Google the day they removed the discussion search filter. Before that day I could find common people talking about a product or a political issue, now unless I'm prepared to jump dozens of pages I'm inundated by sites selling that product or affiliated with that political orientation.

[EvanDotPro]

I had actually forgotten all about the discussion filter and hadn't noticed it was even removed until reading this comment. I never utilized it much back when it was available but in retrospect can definitely think of cases where this would've come in handy if I had thought to use it.

I immediately thought there must be some clever combination of query modifiers that could roughly reproduce the discussion filter behavior... Of course I'm not the first one with this idea— there seems to be browser extensions[1][2] that accomplish this by appending your search query with:

  intext:forum "post"|inurl:forum|"posts:"|inurl:viewtopic 

It seems to work reasonably well after a couple tests and could probably be improved to catch more discussion sites with some additional piped modifiers if necessary. Anyway, just thought I'd share my findings.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/discussions-button...

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-forum-...

[rand_r]

> they removed the discussion search filter.

Could you provide more detail on this search filter? I haven't heard about its removal before and it sounds interesting.

[squarefoot]

A search for "google discussion search" brings lots of results.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/Psb6O...

https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/2b54ux/google_compl...

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f11-off-topic-discussion/130...

...etc.

[captainlego]

For now...