<p>Many of the questions asked here are relevant to research I'm doing. These questions and answers are widely dispersed and not always easy to find, doing manual browsing, and sometimes an insightful answer or comment occurs in unrelated topics as well.</p>

<p>I want to automate finding these relevant Q's &amp; A's, based on sets of keywords, then use the information as pointers towards further in-depth research.</p>

<p>What tools, preferably open-source, are available that I can use for this type of site-mining? I am not a web guru &amp; for me to try to develop them will take a long time and also impact on time I could have spent on my R&amp;D.</p>

Human interaction tools might be useful in such case (no development cost, probably a more consistent outcome, and evolving requirements).
Couple comes to mind:
Mechanical Turk
.
Time Svr
(more expensive) -
experiment/review
.