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Deja.com Vu!
keen writes "Deja.com
is
back to its old self
again, after trying its luck with the annoying 'percision buying service' for far too long. Finally, no need to click through to usenet search."
The buying advice section was snapped up by half.com, who will roll it out early next year. Their Usenet search is typically the second place I go when I see cryptic Linux error messages; someone else has always had the same problem and about half the time they got a decent response.
(Here's the
first place.)
Although I hope that half.com improves upon it.
Here are its problems in my view:
(1) It was in dire need of good moderation (ala Slashdot). Too many of the reviews on there were "This is a good car" or "This is a good video card." These should be moderated to the netherworld to make room for the people that make meaningful posts. Deja.com had the start of a good system - an "i find this review helpful" button, but I believe it needs to be elaborated on. I actually emailed Deja about this but recieved no response.
(2) More of an audience - some of the items on there didnt have enough ratings to be meaningful. A relatively mediocre product could have 5 ratings on 5.0 by non informed users and therefore be misleading to the Deja user.
(3) A better organizational and/or search engine. I found it clunky to navigate to what I was looking for.
C/NET and Amazon have proven that reviewing definitely has a place on the Internet. I hope half.com recognizess the potential of Deja.
I'm looking forward to seeing Deja ramp up its DejaNews service now, offering even more features in its News interface.
Execute? [Y/N] _
The best use I've had for them (and I'm suprised they haven't built a business around it) is for looking up things about companies that their Web site wouldn't say. For example I once found out that an organization that our company was going to deal with was just a Microsoft front-end. Of course, you have to wade through the rumors and lies, but getting people's impression is often quite important too.
The other key thing I look for is the competition for a given software product.
I use deja.com on a daily basis, but it drives me crazy that I have to wait several seconds for each page to reload just by hitting the forward and back buttons on the browser.
Hint to deja.com: your archive hasn't changed that much in the last thirty seconds. Let my browser cache do its work and if I really want to reload a query, I'll punch the button in my browser that says reload.
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314-15-9265
You're better off without the "/=dnc" in the URL. That URL gives you the "classic deja interface" which is missing features, such as the ability to jump to a newsgroup directly from a message posted in that newsgroup. Very handy if you need to search for some topic but don't know what newsgroup covers that topic.
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And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I didn't think anyone else cared! I thought I was the only one in the world who bothered to use deja for it's usenet search.
All the smart people I know lived by it. And the dumb person I know (me) did too.
There is nothing else like it for tracking down obscure information - web crawling search engines don't come close. Nowhere else can you find almost any question asked, answered, and debated to resolution by a community of knowledgeable people. The usenet archive - moreso before it got lobotomized to mid-1999 - was the number one most useful technical research tool on the internet.
Unfortunately, I don't see how it can be made profitable in these post-banner-ad days. But a public service like this needs to be maintained! All I can pray for is that an internet philanthropist like Brewster Kahle decides to buy up the archive and put it online at a loss. If I had the money I'd do it myself. (And no, I wouldn't charge for it - I consider that highly inappropriate since the postings were made freely)
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
An alternate interface to the Usenet search can be found at http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/deja.html.
I find this form much easier to use than the one Deja.com provides; it has also remained unchanged through all incarnations of Deja.com in recent memory.
I think most of the people who use Deja to get product information used the USENET stuff to get the info, and that the "precision buying" stuff was what Deja tried to create when it realized that a lot of folks were typing in product names in an effort to get de facto reviews from USENET users.
I'm one of the ones who says that's bloat/crap, because the USENET portion was where I got the useful info on products when making buying decisions.
> i find the ratings and comments from owners to be very valuable in making a choice.
I'll take this in two parts: Ratings and comments. (Don't take these remarks personally - they're basically a thrashing out of how I believe most Deja users cruised USENET to get product evaluations).
- Ratings:
- Comments:
In a nutshell - most of the time, the I don't want a product review. I just wanna see what people are doing with the widget, and if they're being successful or not, and if not, what the workarounds are.To me, useless. (1) "Internet polls" aren't valid and are easily stacked, and (2) a list of integers on some arbitrary array of categories doesn't tell me bugger all, which I'll get to in the "Comments" section.
Useful - but what does this provide that USENET doesn't?
When I buy, I tend to have both general questions (I wanna read lots of comments and see if people are consistently reporting problems of which I was unaware), or extremely specific questions. Usually both.
The USENET search engine helps me with the specific stuff - what's the horizontal output transistor on a FooBar 17XYZ monitor I'm trying to fix? Does the new FooBar 21XYZ fail the same way as the 17XYZ always seems to?
And the general stuff -- like realizing that there are a whole lot of dead 17XYZs out there when I search for the thing in sci.electronics.repair and find dozens of threads and the word "crap".
The ability to search - not just for "product reviews" (from typical users who say "Yeah, it rawkz", or "ug, it sux"), but for typical failure modes (sci.electronics.repair), company-related production delays (anyone try to get an ATI All-In-Wonder 128 with 32M in mid-1999?), and what-not - by segregating by newsgroup and keyword, and with contributors from all USENET users - beats the hell out of any "product review" site whose participants are limited to those who actually decide to work within the Deja system.
And that gets to the last point - interoperability. The ability to cram two keywords into a USENET search gives me the ability to isolate likely hardware conflicts. Product reviews can't, unless you're very lucky that the reviewer had the same configuration you did.
No product review will ever tell you that you can solve Creative Labs SBLive! PCI / ATI AIW128-32 conflicts on a BX6 motherboard by making sure that the sound card is in the proper PCI slot, because there's a shared IRQ between one of the PCI and AGP slots, and you can really screw yourself up unless you put the damn card in the right slot.
Nobody at Creative could really be expected to know this, nor anyone at ATI, nor anyone at ABit. But lots of people had the problem, someone solved it by swapping cards, and posted the solution to USENET, and voila - I can now buy all three products at once, knowing that any other threads (that say they don't interoperate) are bogus.
Now... if only they'd get the old archives back. I've got a hunk of circuit board labeled "Jovian Logic", and "ViewMagic", made in 1995, that has lots of video-like connectors on it. I'm guessing it's a VGANTSC converter with S-Video capability, but I can't tell which ports are inputs and which ports are outputs, or what the DIP switches on it are for.
If Deja's old archives were up, I could probably type in a few keywords from the board's silkscreening, find it, and figure out what the hell this thing really is, and make myself a nice toy for Christmas.
Because I think thanks is all they're going to have to go on after not too long. I mean, this seems awesome, but didn't they start that product review junk because maintaining a huge-ass usenet archive just isn't profitable? So it seems like going backwards 2 years doesn't really get them anywhere financially except no longer barking up that particular wrong tree.
Still some work to do to stay in business, though...
Deja.com is an awesome resource, it's good to have it back.
It didn't go away. The actual resource part of it was always there.
However, it was severely crippled when they limited it to May 15 1999. You can't get anything before then out of the archives.
So in some ways it never went away. Certainly, it isn't back by any stretch of the imagination. It'll only be back when the full archive is back online.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I use OE when I use Windows, it's not that bad - could be better, particularly as offline reading goes and it needs the ability to edit headers.
But I was talking about console not GUI, so OE and Agent don't count.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change
revenue of $922,000 in the first quarter
That kind of revenue stream could pay for colo space, bandwidth, and the salaries of a handful of techies and programmers.
The loss of $1.25 million comes from an idiot CEO who hired dozens of marketing and sales and business consultants, attempting to ride the dotcom vapour blowout. Now that the bubble has burst, they have realised they don't need 20 marketing people, they already have a brand name presence on the internet most dotcoms would kill for.
With any luck, they will realise there is a market for searching usenet archives going back 15 years, and set up a parallel pay-for-performance system for corporate groups. If you were the head of a large programming group, would you pay for a local copy of deja's DB, covering comp.* and alt.* from 1985 to a few months ago?
They could also sell their text archiving and indexing system to large companies, the same as google, ask jeeves, and others are doing. They might be doing that now, I just haven't heard about it.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
http://www.deja.com/corp/
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
You have the right idea, but very possibly the wrong numbers (these data were from 1998). Now that we have better data on user behavior, and a not-so-booming economic situation to play with, It wouldn't surprise me if deja.com (or even dejanews.com :-)) could only depend on half or a third of that income stream. Then I think the
cost situation gets a lot more tricky.
There is *some* market for this, sure, but less than you might expect. I think it was Henry Spencer who pointed out that, if you extrapolate from the data we had, the truly most useful and popular post on Usenet is the post you are about to make (or am I confused?). Now, I *loved* the fact that I used to be able to go back in time using the dejanews archive and find out how much of a weenie I used to be in the early 90s, but I'm afraid I can't (yet) impute a beefy profit stream to Usenet nostalgia.
So why don't they do this? To paraphrase the Old Prospector in Toy Story 2: Two words: Remarq Dotcom. It's very possible there's still some money in this kind of thing, but I'm not sure.
Babar
It's good to see one of the best (IMO, anyway) sites getting back to its roots and focusing on doing one thing, and doing it well.
Get rid of the cruft (amazon.com, you listening?) and the users will beat a path to your NIC.
NO CARRIER
http://www.deja.com/=dnc/home_ps.shtml still seems to be the best way to get rid of the cluttered look associated with Deja's later incarnations. Give it a try if you just want the straight Usenet search from the old-school DejaNews days.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
So Dejanews has gone from a decent Usenet archive/search engine, to a shopping advice service, to a Usenet archive going back all of 20 months. Where's the rest of it?
Maybe the money they made by selling the shopping service will allow them to go buy some new hard drives and get the old stuff back on-line. OTOH, maybe not...
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now that dotcoms are starting to realise that banner revenue just doesn't cut it, they are going back to their original good ideas.
Now the power search is just one click away from the main screen. That is good. The archives still only go back to May 1999, that is not so good. And they still seem to place all kinds of special links into other people's posts. That's not good at all.
With any luck, the smart people at deja will continue to beat the shit out of the marketing droids and idiot managers, and finally restore one of the internet's great services to full functionality. With even more luck, they wont try to harvest sensitive user data in the hopes of wringing out a tiny fraction more revenue.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
but i actually used the "precision buying" part of deja. i originally went there for the Usenet feeds, but lately i've been going to deja.com for a lot of my research when buying things like consumer electronics. i find the ratings and comments from owners to be very valuable in making a choice.
it's not a big deal, i'll just go to half.com for that stuff now, but i actually found it useful to be included with the Usenet posts. i use Usenet searches as a second source for more reviews of products. i certainly never thought of it as "cruft" or "bloat" like some people here.
incidentally, what other sites out there offer a similar service? the more reviews the better! you can't trust magazines because of the potential for corporate tampering, so online reviews are great!
- j
If they ever restore the Usenet posts from prior to 1998 then there will be news to post about. The fact that the product review side of Deja is removed is not really news. All it does is remove one extra click (out of the the seemingly thousands it now takes to find anything on the web.)
The problem with any idea involving internet philanthropy is that it can be horrifically expensive if you give it enough bandwidth, but reasonably useless if you don't.
My personal guess is that something like dejanews is most valuable to a successful company in the searching and indexing world. Actually, the specific candidate I have in mind is google. I think it's pretty obvious that the google model for rating/ranking the usefulness of content could be applied to Usenet archives in a big way (the biggest challenge being to recognize and deal appopriately with flame wars). It's also the case that if people "knew" or "believed" that dejanews URLs would be permanent in some sense, that they'd use and link to them as they would to any other net resource, and the usefulness of the whole enterprise would go way up. So you type something like "linux kernel usb support" into google, and then you'd get back not just a few random-ish web pages, but the key usenet threads on the subject.
Heck, now that yahoo is growing more dependent on google to be it's web-indexing device, it should become really clear to google that they really, truly want to do this.
At least, I can hope...
Babar
I quite like it - they are one of the few dotcom ventures I've ever seen that actually pays off on its promises. I'm not going to say I got rich or anything - I've earned about $600 in a year of reviewing on the site, and I know of people who spend oodles of time on it and get a few thousand bucks out of it.
The epinions system has two interesting advantages over Deja - they pay, and their community features (web of trust, convenient ways to check out people's interests) are very cool. The money got me curious, the community features make me stay.
D
(My account is daviddennis; note that I get paid if you create an account and read my reviews, but not if you don't).
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check out www.epinions.com. I won't give you a username to credit because I don't have one. Great resource, though--better than Deja ever was.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The only change I see is that www.dejanews.com once again redirects to the page www.deja.com. The usenet search otherwise looks exactly the same to me -- the same busted article threading, the same crufty featureless search engine, the same hobbled archive only going back about 17 months, the same totally broken "select language" non-feature.
Let's face it -- the usenet news part of deja has been neglected for a looong time now. Only time will show if this move reflects deja's renewed interest in being the best usenet news archive available, or if if its just a pit stop on the road to closing the doors and shutting the lights.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I always thought that the buying service was horrible. I mean, if I want advice, I'll search the newsgroups for " and review", not look at a bunch of meaningless 1-10 ratings. Anyway epinions.com ate their lunch.
A workaround for the excessive no-cache latency of Deja.com is to use Junkbuster with my patch to the file parsers.c as follows:
+++ parsers.c Fri Feb 20 17:40:32 1998
@@ -27,26 +27,20 @@
{ "from:", 9, client_from },
{ "cookie:", 7, client_send_cookie },
{ "x-forwarded-for:", 16, client_x_forwarded },
{ "pragma:", 7, crumble },
Or if you don't follow the diff, just add the pragma line above by hand. Just recompile and install it.
Scroogle
I prefer tin but you are correct. The only thing most of the terminal based newsreaders lack is good binary decoding ability.
Of course that's only an issue if you read binary groups, which deja doesn't carry anyway.
What I would really like to see is a combined mail/news reader. I'm one of those who actually like to see them both in the same program. Pine has a newsreader but it was pretty crap.
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enterfornone - logging in for a change