Google brought back forums search, too little too late.

[Webmasterzzz]

Forum search was something that existed around 10 to 15 years ago. At that time, Google saw a reduction in ad revenue when people read forum posts recommendations instead of the ads context. Many years later, after the AI boom, which makes people to use search engines less every day, they brought forum search back.
IMO, it is too late. There are too many bots making garbage posts now, which makes forum search unreliable. The feature could have made sense before AI, not now.

 

[alonelywriter]

For some queries that I do related to gaming, forum results are still better than AI generate content. Today more and more forums are getting flooded with ai generated slop content thus making it hard to trust what i am reading.

 

[kostad]

I get your points, forums used to feel more natural, now you have to dig through a lot more noise to find useful discussions

 

[Webmasterzzz]

I get your points, forums used to feel more natural, now you have to dig through a lot more noise to find useful discussions

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for carrot cake

 

[tazarbm]

I get your points, forums used to feel more natural, now you have to dig through a lot more noise to find useful discussions

it's not noise, bro! It's garbage, let's stop cuddling all of the crap in our lives by calling it less "harmful" names. It's absolute, pure trash and slop, it's not "noise"

 

[mirrorer]

Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for carrot cake

Yes,to me as well. I want a vegan carrot cake without carrots.

 

[ads studio]

You’ve got a fair point timing matters a lot with features like this. The usefulness really depends on how clean and moderated the data is, otherwise search just turns into noise.

 

[Somenpla]

I can see that argument. A lot of forum content today is flooded with AI-generated replies, spam, and low-effort posts, which makes finding genuine insights harder than it used to be. At the same time, many users still trust real discussions more than polished marketing content. That's probably why forums and communities keep showing up in search results.....the value is still there, but the signal-to-noise ratio is definitely worse than it was 10 years ago.

 

[MajestySEO]

lol at the carrot cake prompt injection. proves the point though, even humans are testing AI behavior on forums now. that's how far gone it is. tazarbm is right, it's not noise it's just trash. google bringing back forum search only works if they can actually filter the slop, which they can't do reliably yet. until then it's just another feature that sounds good in a blog post.

 

[adslight]

Still, search engines are not relying on forums blindly. they usually rank specific threads, comments, and discussions that show real engagement, not just random content.

 

[uplyncio]

Forum search was something that existed around 10 to 15 years ago. At that time, Google saw a reduction in ad revenue when people read forum posts recommendations instead of the ads context. Many years later, after the AI boom, which makes people to use search engines less every day, they brought forum search back.
IMO, it is too late. There are too many bots making garbage posts now, which makes forum search unreliable. The feature could have made sense before AI, not now.

Quality discussion still exit but they're buried under too much low value content.

 

[Pixel Raider]

I think forums still have value because real user experiences are hard to replace but i agree that quality control is a big challenge now.
A lot of forums are filled with low quality content so the useful discussions can get buried. If google can filter genuine conversations better then forum results could still be helpful.

 

[Cagun]

I agree with you

 

[Starblazer]

Google wants to scrape data. Reddit alone is not enough, so they're scraping from forums too. They'll do whatever it takes to make more money.