"DIY" BBS and blog monitoring in China

Apologies for the lag since the last post. But let's continue the discussion of BBS and blog monitoring in China.

Actually, China Web 2.0 blog pretty much summarizes the situation of blog search in China’s Blog Search Engines Suck. Not much more to add here.

For BBS, you won't do much better. Teein is the best, but still has a 2-3 day lag and misses significant sites and chunks of data. You can, however, select to view results by week and by month to at least give you an idea of the volume of messages you are getting within a certain time period, which is especially useful during crisis situations.

You can try searching within Google and Baidu as well for BBS, but the time stamps on the results are not accurate. Actually, Google has not time stamp at all. For both Baidu and Google, you can view results by different time periods such as 1 month or 3 months, but the time is determined by when the post was indexed, not when it was posted.

ChinaBBS is one of the more popular sites in the world (Alexa #67) and it focuses on aggregating BBS content. However, its search function is miserable.

Matthew Hurst lists some English language board search tools here, but none that I am aware of cover significant numbers of Chinese sites.

If anyone has a Chinese BBS search engine that they think is better than Teein, I would love to hear.