Getting Forum URL's From Google

aagthosting

I am writing a script that will use snoopy to query Google for a keyword. Lets say the keyword is "web hosting forum". Another keyword might be "web hosting blog", etc.

When I query for a forum I need to be able to check to see if the site is a forum and then check to see what forum software they are using. How do I do this?

dagon

i can't really think of any reliable way to do this, you may be able to find some of the common forums based on perhaps meta tags, but my custom forum and other will be very hard to spot.

looking at this page you see <meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.7.2" />

aagthosting

What code should I use to get url of the ho9me page of the forum. I was looking at forums on google and some forums are on the tld and some are in a sub directory. If the home page of the forum is on the tld "www.abc.com" then I need to put that tld in my DB. If the home page of the forum is "www.abc.com/forum" then I need to put that domain in my db.

samuelcook

I might recommend looking into file_get_contents. Reading the page for preg_matches against an array of possibilities, using "i" for incase sensitive searches. Then if the match comes back then you know you have a forum. But as mentioned above this can still be very unreliable.