Search engines are the keys to the vast knowledgebase distributed over the web. Agreed. At the same time it is also true that search engines do not provide you the direct answer to your query. What you get is a list of documents the search engine thought relevant to your search query. You need to browse through these documents in the hope of getting the answer. Though search engines are getting sharper at finding the relevant documents - it is still a long way when they will fully comprehend the meaning of your query and you still do not get a direct answer!

It is here that the forums provide an alternative. Previously known as bulletin boards or message boards, forums are the best thing a net newbie can come across. You can find all the information you need by joining and querying in forums. Most of the big and reputed forums are moderated by experienced people. As a forum user you benefit from the accumulated knowledge of these learned persons.

You can expect a wide range of viewpoints and beliefs found for a certain query or issue. This gives you a better understanding of that particular issue.

You can always rely on getting some helpful soul at some forum to guide you to find answer to your query. At the minimum you will get reference to resources which contain answer to your queries. So you don’t have to change your keyword combination, try different phrases or different search engines to get what you are looking for. All you need to do in a forum is to express explicitly what you are looking for.

Archived forum topics sometimes provide the best way to find an answer to very obscure questions, such as how to fix a particular software problem, a loan problem, a financial problem … the list is endless! There are thousands of forums catering to differenttopics and areas of discussion. Find out which one covers your query topic, join the forum and post your question and wait for a flood of replies!!

About the author: Author Bio : Lakhya Phukan is the webmaster of Hedir Web Directory http://www.hedir.com Webmasters join Hedir Forum http://www.hedir.com/groupthink/ to discuss directory development.