The new feature will apply to sites that have a large number of relevant posts for a user's search query. Users will see the topic of the thread, the number of posts, and the date the thread was posted.

According to Google's post from director of product management Johanna Wright, "We hope this feature gives you a deeper view into the relevant content available on sites throughout the web - even when that content spans multiple pages or discussions. At the same time, the main search results are diverse as always - so if you can't pinpoint a useful comment there's a list of relevant sites there to help."

The feature seems simple enough, but it's a relevant and welcome addition to Google's search offering and an interesting commentary on the SEO value of forum discussions. In a recent video interview with Vanilla forum software creator Mark O'Sullivan, we chatted in depth on the evergreen nature and value of forum discussions, especially in terms of search.

We can speculate that the Google team might be working on a similar solution for Q&A sites; it would only make sense.

UserVoice is one of the most exciting things we've seen on the web for some time - the User Experience is fabulous. We keep getting excited about it, so we decided to write a post about why we love it so much. Maybe you'll fall in love with it too, or maybe the things we love about UserVoice will help you make other applications more lovable in some of the same ways.

Getting to Know UserVoice

The best way to get a feel for UserVoice is to use it. Many of its best qualities are immediately evident. We took 5 minutes, maybe less, and set up a reader feedback forum using the service on this page. - You can also get to it by clicking on the handy little "feedback" tab the system put on the right hand side of your screen.

UserVoice is lead by Marcus Nelson and Richard White, a veteran of YCombinator funded online calendar service Kiko.com. Kiko was a company with a great interface but whose market share was allegedly demolished by the introduction of Google Calendar, and White was in charge of that great interface. The interface for UserVoice is similarly inspired.

According to White, the idea for UserVoice came from a 2005 article by developer-guru Joel Spolsky about giving your programmers a finite number of votes to allocate in order to prioritize software development opportunities. That's what White told Spolsky, at least, in a fun interview he did on Spolsky's and Jeff Atwood's excellent podcast Stack Overflow last month.

UserVoice is now on a roll. The company reports that it powers customer suggestions for more than 7000 organizations, from giant companies like Sun Microsystems and Nokia to tiny bleeding edge startups like 12Seconds.tv and Alert Thingy. This week the company began offering enterprise level subscriptions to its service.

Why are so many people excited about UserVoice? We can't speak for others, but these are the reasons we keep thinking about it. We've also got a few concerns about the system and those are discussed below as well.

Why We Love It

Design

UserVoice is really graceful, the interface is a beautiful mix of feature richness and simplicity. The use of lightboxes, when a little pop-up window appears and the rest of the page darkens, is really well done.

The site makes great use of colors and fonts. Nice big icons are easy to push for common commands like closing a lightbox window.

Creating a user feedback forum for your community is really easy to do. Customization happens just by clicking on the elements you want to change.

Ease of Use

For visitors, it's easy to immediately start using a UserVoice forum. Anonymous users can contribute. When you make a suggestion the search to see if it's a duplicate is fast and graceful.

Information architecture is intuitive; the site is a pleasure to use. Forum owners can even prepopulate their forums by batch upload of topics by CSV!

We did experience some trouble with account creation but that may have been an issue with our unrelated account management browser plug-ins. When we did run into problems, the error pages were not well crafted, though.

Smarts

This is a system that fills a clear need. It's a need that countless other people have tried to fill, but the UserVoice team waded bravely into the market with fresh ideas and contemporary design sensibility and the results are awesome.

The management of information is really smart. If you spend some time looking at the display options, you'll see that they are quite thought provoking.

The fundamental premise that people will make more meaningful decisions about prioritization if prioritization is a finite resource is a very interesting one.

Nothing is perfect and we see some warts on UserVoice as well. So far our activities on one forum and on another aren't reflected on the same profile pages, though they are in our user RSS feeds.

Data portability doesn't exist, beyond RSS feeds, unless you're a subscriber to the service. Starting at $289 per month means that many small organizations might be priced out of being able to access their own user data, but UserVoice says to get in touch with them if you're a small shop. There's something that strikes us as a little funky about that, but we can see how it might work out well too.

We used to say that similar forum service Satisfaction was one of the most important examples of good User Experience we knew of. (See Garrett Dimon's excellent post on that.) Right now, though, we're more excited about UserVoice than we are about almost anything else we've seen lately.

Check it out in action and let us know how we can serve you better here at ReadWriteWeb on our UserVoice page.

Highlighted changes include reputation, designation of "top contributors," standards-based profiles that extend across Google products and the web, and the ability for Google staff and top contributors to mark some questions as answered.

In initial testing of the forums, we wish there was more AJAX, but otherwise we think it looks good. The Google Profiles are both good because of their awesome standards-based extensibility (they are marked up with the Social Graph API and hCard) and a potential privacy concern because the limits of that Social Graph API are not firmly defined. Your profile is here.

Much of the user experience here is reminiscent of GetSatisfaction, a still clearly superior help-forum service. Another example of a really good forum for a large number of people can be found in the Spiceworks developer forum.

We hope that all Google Groups will soon include the new features that the Help Forums now do and we hope that the improvement will continue. Google products evolve so much slower than many of us expect that every announcement like this is a very big deal.

Microsoft announced today that it will soon close down its 13 year old forum site MSN Groups and it's encouraging its users to export their conversations over to its new official partner, Multiply. It's a big win for one of the most solid social networks online.

Multiply has a rabidly loyal following, something that might change with an infusion of MSN Groups members, and its feature set is impressive. It's best known for its very granular privacy controls on published content.

Additionally, when Multiply rolled up a number of their super-frequent feature updates into one relaunch last year, we said it compared favorably with Facebook in the following ways:

• Facebook has a newsfeed displaying updates from your friends. Multiply lets you slide your newsfeed to include in your display just your own updates, your contacts' updates, and/or your close or distant networks' updates.


• Facebook has a smooth in-house video app, but the new Multiply app lets you leave audio or video comments anywhere and see any user's other media from inside the player.


• Facebook made big improvements to its email messaging (sending you the actual message in your email instead of just a link) but Multiply now has 8 email alert controls and more.

How many people are now being told to shift from MSN Groups to Multiply? We started asking around but quickly realized that we'd do better to try to squeeze beer out of a rock than user numbers out of Microsoft. According to coverage at Liveside, a new Live.com Groups will launch in mid November. We hear that Live Groups is actually pretty hot looking, so why people are being sent to Multiply we don't really now.

Will users of the old-fashioned MSN Groups make the transition well and enjoy Multiply? We're not sure, but we wouldn't be surprised. We like Multiply and we think it's pretty cool that MSN users are headed there.