Google Search's search filters can be a useful tool when you research something on the Internet. They enable you to limit results, for instance so that only video, news or image results are displayed.
While Google won't touch those major ones, it appears that the company has removed several "lesser" used filters of the "More" menu from its search engine.
When you click on the more link right now, you will notice that only four or five options remain, instead of the ten that were displayed previously.
Gone are for example blogs, discussions, recipes, patents or places. The remaining options may be shuffled around as well now, so that one entry that you found listed under more may now appear on the main bar directly based on your search query.
Users who have made use of the discussion filter on Google are complaining about the removal on Google's product forums.
So what does the discussion filter do? It limits search results to discussion forums mainly. If you perform a discussion search, you end up with a list of forum results only that you can go through. Other types of results, e.g. blog results, news sites or social sites, are filtered from the results.
The blog and places filters work in a similar fashion. They filter out all results but the desired one from search.
Getting discussions, blog search and places search back
While the discussion option has been removed from the search filter list up top, it has not been removed from Google Search itself, at least not for now.
While this can happen anytime, the following ways allow you to search for discussions on Google Search right now.
1. Search Discussions directly
This is probably the most reliable option right now. Instead of loading the main Google Search homepage as your entry point for your search, you load the Search Discussions page instead.
2. Search for discussions indirectly
You can also search for discussions indirectly, meaning from any Google search form, by appending discussions to the end of the query.
If you want to search for forum posts about Microsoft's upcoming operating system Windows 9, you can do so by searching for "Windows 9 discussions" on Google.
Note that this does not work all of the time. If it does not work, append &tbm=dsc to the query to enable discussions search.
Once you do, you will notice that Search tools lists "All discussions" here as an option which you can use to filter by forums or questions & answers sites.
3. Blog Search
search blogs
To get blog search back, use the following entry point. It enables the Search Blogs option right away so that you can search for blogs on Google without having to worry about any of the other results that Google may throw at you.
4. Places Search
Load this page to search for places directly. It works just like the blog and discussion searches, meaning that all other results will be filtered out by Google so that you end up with nothing but places in the results.
Summary
Blogs: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=blg
Discussions: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=dsc
Images: https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=vi
Patents: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=pts
Places: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=plcs
Recipes: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=rcp
Videos: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbm=vid
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The post Here is how you search discussions, blogs, places on Google now appeared first on gHacks Technology News., all rights reserved.