This is a follow-up of a post earlier this month:
https://discussion.fool.com/thank-you-for-posting-this-fricknfoo…
To recap: there’s a non-TMF affiliated search engine for 10 various boards:
http://www.datahelper.com/mi/search.phtml
And of course, every regular reader of this board, upon finding out about this, had the IMMEDIATE thought:
OMG, it would be INCREDIBLY useful if Saul’s board were to be added to this list! How can we make this happen??
The answer to that question is is simple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNoAHetRpEA
Apparently, this search engine goes way back to not long after the dot-com crash. When it wasn’t clear how many tech companies would survive. What if The Motley Fool, and all of its discussion boards, were to disappear without warning? (Yes, that’s actually what inspired its creation. And if you’re familiar with the state-of-the-art TMF boards, that’s actually not a ridiculous fear.) Thus was born the aforementioned search engine!
How do I know this? Because I emailed the host of that website. His username on here is MarkW, though I will henceforth refer to him as our Hero Of The Month (H.O.T.M.). Sorry, Eric Yuan. (https://discussion.fool.com/zoom-ceo-eric-yuan-hero-34519852.asp…)
Our Hero hasn’t been too active on here lately, and he wasn’t familiar with Saul’s board. So after a quick elevator pitch and a sheepish request to add Saul’s board to his search engine, pro bono (you would cringe too, writing the owner of an independent software company for a software-related favor, because, um…there’s this old guy on the internet who can really get 75% CAGR, year-over-year, no strings attached. Seriously! Yeah, that sounds legit), I was relieved to find an enthusiastic email in my inbox the following morning.
Anyways, it wasn’t as simple as changing a single line of code, but our H.O.T.M. was happy to do it. But it would take some time to download all of the messages from TMF website without upsetting the web overloads (don’t laugh, have you been on TMF message boards? Have you also seen The Rest Of The Internet?) Saul’s board started in early 2014, and our H.O.T.M. started scraping the board posts, pseudo-manually, from oldest to newest. This was a week ago. I’ve been checking every day for the past week, and now we’re up to early 2019. If all goes well, sometime this week, we should be up-to-date.
Take a look! It’s not perfect, it doesn’t have every bell and whistle that one could dream up. But it gets the job done. And it’s AWESOME. You can search by keyword, by author, you can specify a date range, and pull up to 500 messages at once. Thank you, H.O.T.M.
What does this mean? First, bookmark this page immediately. Going forward (referencing a post from earlier today), when someone like Miklo wonders about VEEV (or I ask about 2014 darling AEYE), and Googing “site:fool.com Saul VEEV” brings up 2-3 unhelpful results, now they can search every message ever posted to Saul’s board containing “VEEV”. Hopefully this will reduce board clutter, and hopefully it will encourage people to cite old “deep dives” on companies they’re discussing, for quick reference, because Google isn’t really all that helpful. We all know this.
One last thing. For everyone in my shoes, who awkwardly answered the question “what do you want for Father’s Day?”, with “uhhhh, I dunno, whatever”: THIS IS YOUR FATHER’S DAY GIFT!!! ENJOY!!!
