Competition in the search engine business is fierce. There are 3 major companies vying for the top spot, with a few smaller companies biting at the big engine’s heels. To innovate within the search industry is to develop niche search engines.

Niche engines are search sites that concentrate on a specific area of the web. ForumZilla has a launched a search engine designed to help users find online forums.

ForumZilla offers this description of their service, “ForumZilla helps web users find online forums for virtually any topic. Each forum listed on ForumZilla is hand checked and contains information on the number of users, the year it launched and the software it uses. If you run a forum, or know a good one, then please make sure you submit it to our editors for review.”

As of now, the content for ForumZilla is a little sparse. Because of this, ForumZilla is looking for volunteer editors who can help in the population of this site. Click here for more information.

ForumZilla has a forum submission page for people to contribute to, although there is a small drawback to this. Because the search results include name, URL, number of users, date launched, and software used, ForumZilla’s submission page requires this information for every submission.

This isn’t much of a problem for webmasters and forum moderators who have this information readily available, but for the typical web user who is looking to help by simply submitting a link may not have all of this information available to them. That can make submitting a forum a little difficult.

In spite of this, to echo ResearchBuzz’s sentiments, it would be nice to see this database take-off. Being that this comes across as a grassroots effort, volunteer editors are imperative in order to populate the database.

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for pointing ForumZilla out.

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