Twing.com is a new search engine for online communities and forums, a relatively untapped market segment. On-line forums are as old as the internet. They have evolved over time and new social media have emerged, Blogs are primarily a one-to-many channel with some exchange though comments and trackbacks but forums are still the place to engage in real asynchronous dialog. Blogs are optimized for search or should I actually say the reverse. Google and other search engines are optimized for blogs with the page rank concept. It has been harder to use traditional search engines to find stuff on forums and the use of forums is one the rise. For example, the TIVO community forum has over 130,000 registered user and 1.2 million unique visits a month.

Last week I spoke with Scott Germaise, Director of Product Management at Twing, a search engine designed for forums and communities. Scott pointed out than many forums start with a question and this can lead to extensive discussion if the topic is right. He said that there are more people participating in one scuba diving forum he is engaged with than the total circulation of all print publications on the topic. But how to find what is going on? How do you find the useful forums?

Twing is designed to address this problem. Scott did a walk through for me. One feature I found useful was the many filters to prevent the thousands of hits you get on many Google searches. They have drop down filters that are dynamically based on the top 50 mentions in a category (e.g. people) on a forum at the time of search.

You can search by posts on a topic (e.g. scuba diving) to find posts within forums that relate to the topic. You can search by topics to find whole discussions on the topic. You can also search by forums to find forums on the topic. In each case you can narrow your search by using the filters. There are filters for top forums, people, and companies related to the topic, as well as by language and media. You can also put a date range in and add terms to avoid.

There is also a community buzz button to take you to the hot topics of the day. You can see the most frequently used search terms and the most discussed topics. There is also a directory of forums arranged by categories. Within each category are sub-categories leading to the actual forums. You can install a Twing search box on your home page through a widget. Twing has its own blog and forums for discussion about the tool. The tool is simple but with enough complexity to make it useful. Scott said that there is sort of a mental “cost-benefit” analysis that people do as they conduct a search with the cost being their time. Twing is designed to make it easy so you continue. If you are into forums you should check this out. Twing is free. Many enterprises are setting up forums to get customer feedback on their products and services.