Bring Back Forum Search, Recipe Search and More

Google Search used to have an option that allowed you to restrict results to forum pages. You'll often find helpful discussions and it's nice to be able to exclude blogs, news sites, videos, shopping sites when searching for a software bug or other tech-related issues.

Fortunately, you can still restrict results to discussions: just add &tbm=dsc to a Google Search URL.

This also works for:

- recipe search: add &tbm=rcp
- local search: add &tbm=plcs
- blog search: add &tbm=blg
- patent search: add &tbm=pts

Here's a screenshot for recipe search:

Blog Search and Patent Search also have standalone sites, while Google Maps is a good place for local search.

You can also bookmark these URLs:

Google Forum Search - https://www.google.com/?tbm=dsc
Google Recipe Search - https://www.google.com/?tbm=rcp
Google Local Search - https://www.google.com/?tbm=plcs

Another option is to visit those pages, right click the search box and select "add as search engine" (Chrome), "add a keyword for this search" (Firefox) or "create search engine" (Opera). I added the keyword "forum" for Google Forum Search, so I can type "forum" in Chrome's Omnibox, press Tab and enter the query.