Omgili is a search engine that indexes web-based discussion boards to see if your question might already be answered somewhere on the web.

Since we reviewed Omgili back in 2006 it has kept evolving and now spiders Digg, MySpace and other social media sites for answers.

I talked to Ran Geva, CEO at Omgili, to find out what’s new.

Pandia: It has been a while since we reviewed Omgili. How has your product evolved since then?

Ran Geva: Omgili has changed a lot, both on the surface and behind the scenes. Here are some of our new features:

Omgili Product Reviews. Here you can find the overall users sentiment about the products you are looking for.

From electronics and computers to books and apparel, it covers thousands of user reviews from various review sites and returns the overall ratings for these products.

Omgili Buzz. This is the place to be if you want to know what people are discussing on the web. From online videos and movies to news and general topics.

The popularity of the topics is updated once an hour by analyzing the content of online discussion sites.

Google@Omgili. By using the Google@Omgili service, you get the best of two worlds — “objective search” (Google) combined with “subjective search” (Omgili).

Other than searching both search engines and getting more information about the search terms you enter, you also get discussions about Google’s search results.

For example, if you are interested in learning more about Barack Obama, searching on Google@Omgili will return results from Google and Omgili, but also discussions about the links returned by Google, a deeper conversations linking to those results.

Search Aid. Search Aid helps you find better results to your search query. You can search in real user queries and get ideas about how to refine your search terms and what are the best keywords to use.

For instance, if you search Search Aid for a broad search term like iPod, you’ll see that previously, others have searched for queries like iPod vs Zune, iTunes to iPod error and iPod videos.

Pandia: Not all discussion forum answers are equally helpful. How do you go about measuring the reliability of answers.

Ran Geva: This is where Omgili is unique. Our proprietary algorithm analyzes the complete discussion (thread) and detects its structure (the different posts), their dates, user names, signatures etc.

When a query is entered, Omgili searches in the context of the complete discussion. A keyword in the 1st reply is more relevant as if it appears in the 17th reply, more so if it is in the topic or the title.

By understanding the discussion, the relevancy of the results is much better. Furthermore, the user has the ability to leverage Omgili’s analysis to search for discussions with minimum number of replies, engaged users or in a certain time frame.

We also calculate the authority of the different boards and boost discussions up or down as a “tiebreaker”.

Pandia: At your site you write that you spider forums, discussion groups, mailing lists and answer boards. What about Yahoo Answers and similar services? And there is bound to be Web 2.0-style sites of advice out there for you to crawl?

Ran Geva: We also crawl Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! message boards. We crawl Digg, MySpace, Yedda, and many others. Basically we try to cover “Many to Many” sites where discussions take place.

Pandia: The Web keeps changing and search engines have to change to be on top of it. What are your plans for the future of Omgili?

Ran Geva: We have many plans for Omgili. As a search engine we are looking to constantly improve the relevancy algorithm and to add more data sources. Spidering blogs and Talkbacks (e.g. Twitters) are on the way.