I use this to specify a particular forum in the Google search bar. For me its the Touch Pro. If we go to that form and look at the url, it is:
http://www.ppcgeeks.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=63
Well Google has a neat little feature for searching called inurl
To specify searchine for alternatives to manila in that forum, I enter in the Google search bar:
manila alternatives inurl:f=63
And voila...only search results from that forum is displayed. The "inurl" command will instruct the google search engine to restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL
Lets say that I wanter to search multiple forums such as "HTC Touch Pro" and "Pocket PC Software". Well, we already know that the forum id for the HTC TP is 63 and going to the Pocket PC forum, we see in the address that the forum id is 23....so I would enter this:
manila alternatives inurl:f=63 OR inurl:f=23
Repeat and expand as necessary. It is not the best solution but it narrows the searches down to what you want.
Hope that helps some of you.
Cheers
John