People’s opinion and discussions often provide the best source of information. These discussions boards or forums are often attended and contributed by people who are both knowledgeable and passionate about a particular area. Best all, people have been having discussing on the web for a long time and chances are someone somewhere on the web has discussed or even answered the very questions you are asking now.
Whilst discussion board do not provide the ultimate truth on a particular topic, they are fantastic for:
- Product/travel location reviews and recommendations
- Troubleshooting or technical help with software/hardware products
- Get opinion or idea within a hobby or interest area
And whilst it is possible to search through discussion boards and forums using Google (is anything impossible with Google ?) by narrowing and limiting your searches to various discussions boards and , there is a better and easier way !
Omgili is a fantastic search engine that specialise in indexing and searching through discussion boards or forums. 
Omgili claims to scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources and can differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date.
Based on my personal experience, it works reasonably well! Once you have done a search, you can see the number of post and replies within a discussion thread (so you can skip the ones with zero replies!) and then narrow your search within a particular forum.
The other way to leverage discussion board effectively is to find the forum or discussion board offered by the company that offered you the products or services. These days, most companies will have some sort of community forum or discussion board on their website to foster a community, build loyalty and get the users to help each others ! For example, if you have issues or question about your iPhone or Mac, the Apple discussion board might be a good place to start your search.
The worst case is that you do come across a community discussion board that covers your area of interested but no one has answered your very specific question, you can always register and put the question out there and join the discussion!
And remember, try to give back to the web community by contributing to these discussion boards so that someone else can benefit from it the way you did!
UPDATE: Google Group Search has just started to include forum discussions in its search results along side results from Google Groups. Just goes to show how important are people’s discussions as a source of useful information!
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