Forums Watcher is a search engine for forums.

Pros: Forums Watcher is a search engine designed to specifically look at and extract information from web based forums. This can be done using pre-defined search terms to extract the relevant information from a huge number of forums that are tracked constantly so that you can receive an alert as and when the desired (or matching) data in a thread becomes available. It has a text focus so that it extracts only the forum text and none of the advertisements etc. that often appear on side bars (note that things such as pictures which might be part of a post within a thread are also ignored, this can be a good or bad thing depending on the kind of forum that the user is interested in).

Barebones interface aims to live up to KISS philosophy and succeeds because what you need is right there and available in an eminently readable pane.

Cons: Barebones interface is also the drawback. It is not customizable and basically you’re stuck with what you have got. Since it tends to be a text-intensive extractor its utility is likely to get dated soon. Any other kind of content does not get extracted and since there isn’t a built-in browser (or even a connection to your existing browser) this ends up meaning that links are no longer useful. If you look at a help forum for example, which may link to other web pages or forums then you’re going to have a problem navigating to that.

Overall: 3 stars. Does its stated function well. But text focus leads to limited utility.