Until not very long ago, the More dropdown menu on the Google search results pages offered the ability to filter the results by type: News, Discussions, Blogs, etc. There were quite a handful of choices and they've all existed for years and years.
It used to work great for me, but for the better part of 2013, I actually found it quite frustrating because whenever I was filtering site:daniweb.com results by Discussions, only news stories and code snippets would come up, and meanwhile all of the forum threads would show up when filtering by Blogs. In fact, I posted something a few months ago suggesting that the reason for our Google traffic decrease might be because Google thinks our forum threads are blogs, and is holding them up to the same editorial quality standard as blog entries as opposed to discussions. A few days ago, I finally had enough and tweeted my frustration to Matt Cutts from Google:
@mattcutts Confused: Our editorial articles and code snippets are classified as Discussions in SERPS and none of our forum discussions are?
Now, a week later, all the filter choices have miraculously disappeared. There's an article about this over at Search Engine Roundtable as well where they seem to suggest that the filter options are now search query-specific, but from everything I can see, the Blogs and Discussions filter choices no longer exist.
Conspiracy? :)
