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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.)
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.
--
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
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.
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.
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
umm... I wouldn't say it exactly does it well. The pre-1999 archives are still offline, and if you've ever tried to use deja.com to participate as a regular member of a newsgroup community, you know it bites.
The story I read on CNet yesterday speculated that the usenet side of Deja may yet be sold to someone else, so the boat hasn't stopped rocking yet.
And actually, that may be a good thing. If a parent with a steady profit can adopt Deja, then perhaps it'll stick around as a cornerstone of the internet. Right now, as a standalone business, Deja's long term prospects aren't encouraging.
With any luck, the new owner might actually pay for development of a more useable browsing UI. Now that Remarq has gone fee-only, there's no other free gateway between the Web and Usenet. You'd think that any of the major portals (Yahoo, About, AltaVista, Go, Netscape, etc.) would love to have Deja's gateway and archives as part of their services. What a jewel that would make!
I can see the fnords!
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
So, "getting back to its roots" really means "still not profitable", which could lead to "showing up on FuckedCompany.com soon".
Enjoy it while they last.
--
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.
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
The long-term plan of most free service sites is to eventually find a way to make money other than banner ads.
I don't believe forcing unrelated content down the user's throat is the best way to go about making that money. This is just my opinion, so your mileage may vary.
I, for one, would be perfectly willing to pay a small fee for access to the lean-and-mean deja.com, if that were the direction they wanted to go. That's closer to old-economy concepts as well: sell the customer what they want, not everything else under the sun.
NO CARRIER