I belong to a lot of forums, and I’m always really frustrated at their search functionality.

Sometimes I want search for a word in just the title, but they don’t offer that as a choice, even in the advanced setting.

Sometimes I want to search for something, but it tells me that the word is too common and won’t let me. (That might be true if I’m searching in any post content, but there shouldn’t be that many instances in the title.)

And a lot of times I want to search for a phrase, but I may not know the exact match.

For all these limitations, that’s why I started using Google to search forums.

I’ll show you what I mean.

I belong to a forum about pet turtles. The site is redearslider.com.

Recently I wanted to find posts dealing with how much water should be in the tank. But when I tried to search for the phrase ‘how much water’ I got this error:

So instead I went to google. I used their "site:" operator to restrict the search to my forum site. Then I put in my phrase.

As you can see, I got back exactly the results I wanted.

The disadvantage to doing it this way is that I can’t restrict my search to one particular group within the forum. And I’m also restricted to the pages in Google’s index, not the entire forum.

But the advantages are that:
1. I’m not limited to the restrictions of the forum search
2. I can take advantage of Google’s search logic. Google knows when words are similar to others, and it will also find results that aren’t limited to what I typed. For instance, look at the second from the bottom result. It doesn’t even have the exact phrase "how much water" in it.

So, I’ll start out by using the forum search, but if I can’t find what I want, I’ll use Google.