Slashdot Mirror
Google Acquires Deja
Ergo2000 was the first of many to
tell us that Google has acquired Deja. Or at least, whats left of it. Accoding to the announcement,
they will reinstate posting, improve searching, and keep the full
500 million message archive since '95 online.
...are now completely without USENET. This truly sucks, to have no way to browse newsgroups by thread.
deja and google are great and all, but i still like focused resources ie slashdot, moreover amd silicongod.com
I was using Deja this morning to catch up on newsgroups and ask some questions, and then this happens. The results you get right now are completely useless in trying to wade through them, and while Deja's old threaded interface wasn't great it was at least useable. I hope they bring back all the functionality Deja had, with accounts so you can see what you've written and gotten replies to. Right now I'll have to hunt for another web based newsgroup reader ....
Doodle
--
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
They also have the scary poetry of Daniel Lavigne
It's missing the time the "tax protestor" wrote an extremely off-colour poem the guy wrote about me.
One of these days, I should put together a "bot" from which I'd grab a bunch of postings by these sorts of folk, build a sort of "parse tree," and then run a random number generator through it to generate pseudo-postings by them... 'Twould be entirely entertaining...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I cant speak for the quality aspect of the searches - in my experience, I have not seen any degradation in the quality of Google.
Attempts to be more commmercially oriented, by partnering with Yahoo and the likes, are not necessarily a bad thing. It implies that revenues are coming from other avenues, and they dont have to resort to charging 'Joe Average' for the service. Does that mean that they will never charge 'Joe Average' for the service ? I dont know the answer to that, but atleast they have made attempts at procuring funds from other sources, before charging the average person.
"Goo goo ga joob" actually.
Sorry I don't often pedant, but I thought a change might do me good.
Just as I was looking forward to the day when my old, youthful rantings on USENET would be gone forever.
:)
Oh well. I'll just have to keep denying it was me...
I agree. This sucks.
I'm not bitter, really. I have a new job that I like, but Damn!, even knowing it was coming, it knocked the wind out of me. I'd worked at Dejanews.com since the second round of financing (Employee 13) and enjoyed the shit out of it. I worked with some of the smartest people that I have ever known. Dedicated, fun to be around, hard working sons-/daughters=of-bitches.
Sure, I didn't like the deja.com switch any more than any of you. Well, maybe more than some of you, but that's not saying much.
We did believe in the idea of dejanews and we worked hard (at least in the beginning) to make it the resource that you have all come to rely on.
If you didn't, would it really rate a headline on slashdot.
I don't understand what google is going to do with the archive, it didn't make money for us, I know that. We geeks didn't really appreciate the advertising revenue aspect from the beginning. We were looking for specific information and once we found it we didn't hang around to click on banners.
At the time I resented you fucks for behaviour that I myself didn't really adopt. I see now, the error of my ways. I was blinded by the 300 per share stock price of our contemporaries like yahoo. It took a lot for me to realize that this shit doesn't just happen for everybody. Or, at least, not any more. However, about a 2 years ago(time of deja.com switch), I realized that there's really no money to be made serving Joe Internet User. They want everything for nothing.
I don't blame anyone for this. I'm just saddened that the dream, or promise, of a new idealism where providing a cool and extremely useful service could bring the appreciation of our peers and perhaps a little cash, was dead. Actually, I don't think that it ever existed. We just wanted it to so badly that we thought that we could make it manifest.
For all of you who complained about the changes that dejanews went though: Fuck you. We did what we thought we had to. I didn't always agree that it was the right thing to do, but WTF. We had to do something to try to keep afloat. Haven't any of you whored yourselves to buy some Ramen at the end of the month.
I realize that this is rambling and I am going nowhere. I am drunk and sad. I just promised myself that I would say something here after all of this.
I love you guys. No, sherioushly. I do. You guysh are great. We need to do thish more often.
Thanks.
And by insignificant assest, you can include the employees, google didn't take any of us.
____ Brad
And lastly, more of a dumb request than anything: if they have the full Unicode data ... can we have the browser translate the dumb picture? Yes, some of its porn...
Yeah, some of it.
You are pathetic.
I feel like picking a fight tonight.
You have no idea how common a request this was. I guarnatee that you (plural) would have given up all of the interesting "conversation" and great technical information just ot see the porn.
Again, Pathetic.
____ Brad
Google front-end already in place.
~Cederic
Now that would be useful and something I'd pay for.
I think the big difference is that Deja was providing a useful, free (ad supported), more-or-less unique service to the net at large.
Since Deja was floundering financially, the alternative is losing the service altogether. Think of Google as a "white knight" -- although that conjures up all sorts of bad connotations from corporate raiders.
I'm sure the brand name is worth quite a bit (at least compared to some other dotcom brands out there).
But I think there definitely is a lot of value in the old archives. Google's help screens say that they're using Google's archive of Usenet since August 2000. Who knows how many people have as comprehensive an archive of Usenet posts going as far back as Deja's?
Further, some people that are really protective about distribution rights have "nuked" their posts on the Deja archive (in addition to specifying X-No-Archive in the header). I would guess Deja's "nuke" list is similarly valuable "property", whose use might save a Usenet archiver some legal headaches.
Umm, the last time I checked, deja did not archive or allow posts to binary groups.
As for anonymity, how does deja's acquisition change anything? They've required a valid email address before granting posting privileges (fwiw). And the news header included either the deja email or real email address anyway.
They have deals with various companies to provide search engine capability. Do a search on Yahoo and Google and you'll see the same results.
It is ironic that the biggest Usenet archive is now owned by a company that indexes the Web.
Considering that most 'net users now use the web for research (rather than usenet), I think it is.
Consider that Usenet groups were once the preferred way of publishing information on the public net. What has supplanted that?
Hint - Google index it.
OK, maybe a bit of a stretch, but hey, it's Slashdot.
*shrugs*
Ah yes, Ann Uumellmahaye. Did you remember how to spell those off the top of your head? I've watched that movie a zillion times (I've got it on DVD now even) but I still don't think I could have remembered how to spell that.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
I've parsed and re-parsed the sentence in question; it appears to be quite grammatical. Which grammatical rule do you think it breaks?
I'll grant that it's not an easy read, and it could be rewritten, but this forum is sort of a cross between talking and writing. You redo your writing; you don't redo your talking unless people look at you strangely and say "What just came out of your mouth?"
Bzzt. You missed the point.
In response to someone telling him that he should not end a sentence with a preposition, WC said (more or less):
This is the sort of English pedantry up with which I will not put.
Much funnier and more appropriate.
heinzkeinz
I notice that the service will be called Groups.google.com. Does this mean that Google will revive Deja's build your own newsgroup feature and then compete with Groups.yahoo.com?
Ah yes, Ann Uumellmahaye...
Er, that's Anne Uumellmahaye.
Jeez, learn to spell!
Pet peeve - the proper lyric is:
"Goo goo goo joob"
Which seems more appropriate for this context anyway.
With this acquisition, Google also obtained DejaNews' privacy problems. Remember: they don't ask anyone for the news postings to be archived.
Something to think about...
Here's an interesting story. It seems that if you search for KDE-related things on Google, you get a sponsored link inviting you to download GNOME.
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
they do advertising... just not those stupid large banner ads...
tagline
... hi bingo
> 'I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo bought Google,'
Try signing up for their "Friends of Google" list. Yahoo Groups...
--
Jim Buchanan
Jim Buchanan
>Holy Crap!
>I hadn't even noticed that!
>
>That has to be the single scariest thing I've
>seen all day.
>
>Ho-hum.
You are obviously filtering out JonKatz articles; a JonKatz article is akin to Durin's Bane.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember back in '94 or so there were some companies selling CD-ROMS of complete archives of usenet from the early eighties to 94 or so. I'm sure some of these are floating around somewhere.
Oh, it doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how you spell it. Unless you do as much acid as the Beatles were doing right around that time.
- Have a picture
Thanks, Bob,
That's what I was thinking. However, to make the original replier happy,
What do you think the odds are of Google acquiring such data?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
that's great, but who are the Chefs?
I concur. I like the boolean commands I can issue:
:(
(freebsd|netbsd|openbsd|bsd|bsdi) & (ipv4|ipv6)
I don't think this is possible at Google. BTW, I have done much more complex searches on Deja in the past. I will go crazy without the full-boolean capability.
I think you should check yourself before jumping this poster. I've been following reaction to this poster and time and again the T word is trotted out. Now, I don't see how your comment really has any thing to say, much less a substantive response to the comment. So who is the troll?
why is it that trolls always have two names, like anne marie or dan hayes(or patrick mcrotch)? and just so its on topic geeks have to eat so this isn't bad.
Well, apparently Google never processed the X-No-Archive outside of the header, for those newbies and/or clueless who never bothered with adding headers INSIDE the header portion of the message. Go to here and scroll down. Some people on news.groups want to sue them for violating the DMCA. At least there's a nice distributed way for distributing DeCSS.
Google kicks ass, and pre-domain-change DejaNews kicks ass! I'm glad that Google is reinstating all of the old services. Here's hoping that they also remove the advertising via news article linking thing that Deja tried too.
--
Donald Roeber
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
Well, to use your list above whould it be:
- The odds are small, of Google acquiring such data.
- I think the odds are small, of Google acquiring such data.
- Do you think the odds are small or large, of Google acquiring such data?
- What do you think the odds are, of Google acquiring such data?
But all of that looks quite painfull to say (although I'm sure a lot of people I know would talk like that). I think it would be better like this:- The odds are small, that Google would acquire such data.
- I think the odds are small, that Google would acquire such data.
- Do you think the odds are small or large, that Google would acquire such data?
- What do you think the odds are, that Google acquire such data?
But even that looks wrong. Am I getting closer?"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
Maybe that you've seen this a million times before...
Of course, it would be easier to read if it had said, "what do you think are the odds of Google acquiring such data?"
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Damn - typo: "remarkably" instead of "remarkable".
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Ironically, it was also credited by an unknown author to King Solomon, under the guise "There is nothing new under the sun" - but he also never said it.
Wow, I guess "Internet time" has gotten so fast that now we bash companies for purchases that some analyst thinks they might make at some future time, and for imagined policies related to said hypothetical purchases. What crazy times we live in!
Yahoo! already claims unlimited non-exclusive use on messages posted to what was formerly known as eGroups. (Plus they add spam ads at the end of every message.) As more and more ISPs drop NNTP explicitly and implicity (through bad service), more and more people have been relying on Deja (now Google "Groups"). So in effect, if Yahoo! purchases Goodle, Yahoo! will be able to claim unlimited non-exclusive use for a growing percentage of UseNet traffic. Plus Yahoo! may start automatically adding spam at the end of every message (i.e. more than "Sent by Deja.com" that Deja did).
"'I wouldn't be surprised if Yahoo bought Google,' says Tomas Isakowitz, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia" in this Red Herring article. Can you see a merging of Yahoo! Groups (aka eGroups aka One List) and UseNet? /. needs to strap a borg headset onto a Yahoo! logo.
Holy Crap!
I hadn't even noticed that!
That has to be the single scariest thing I've seen all day.
Ho-hum.
A few recent changes really sucked, and the whole layout could use an overhaul. Google's been great since the start, I hope they shape up what's left of Deja.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I was browsing Deja this morning, and then they acquired it, and then No More Deja!!! WTF, can they at least keep a running version while they make the transition?????? This is stupid...
In a recent edition of Ad Libs (the newsletter of the Patent & Trademark Depository Library Program), an entry entitled "Patent Myths" addresses this topic. An excerpt reads "Duell, it is often alledged, recommended that the USPatent Office be closed because 'everthing that can be invented has been invented.' It's a good story, but entirely false. Don Kelly, director of the USPTO Independent Inventors Program Office, takes on the myth in 'Setting the Record Straight,' published in the May/June issue of Inventor's Digest (p10-11). On page 116 of the Patent Office Pony, the following appears "Mr. Ellsworth wrote one sentence in the 1843 report which has been misunderstood and misquoted ever since. He wrote 'the advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.' The statement which is usually falsely attirbuted to some commissioner or another, based upon this is that 'Everything that can be invented has been invented.' No commissioner has ever said this ... in his
1988
book, Victory without War, Richard Nixon attributed the latter statement as
of
1899 to Commissioner Duell, who also never said it"
So how is this ironic?
dejanews is BY FAR the number one service that I would pay for on the internet if everything wasn't free. I have been using it for years, and if you count the cost in development time it has saved me personally when trying to figure out some nit picky little bug or find a quick and dirty solution/ code sample, it would be easily thousands of dollars.
Why, the currency of choice on Slashdot: karma!
I know it's not much, and I'm guessing you have to be close to the cap, but I'll keep you on file as someone to mod up... :)
No, they run a farm in Columbia. That provides most of the revenue for Google to keep running.
--
right now it's an unuseable site, what's the difference.
most people seem to think it's great. i'm not one of them. if google wanted to get into the usenet search business they should just started they're own instead of destroying something that works.
If I wanted to, I could use Google as some sort of ads on request machine to get offers of whatever I want.
But wouldn't it be quicker and easier to use GoTo.com as your ads-on-request machine? Pay-For-Performance(TM) is what they do.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
"at the moment I don't seem to be able to access anything but my my-deja email"
I cant even get that! I can see my password on the url as it struggles to log me on, but thats about it!
Nah, that was Kajagoogoo
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
yes, things will be better in a long run but for now I can't post to usenet. REMARQ is not longer free, and now DEJA essentially is non-functional. Any free web-based access to usenet anyone is aware of? TIA.
The feeling that you've done this search before.
The Press Release seems to concentrate more on the acquisition of the Usenet archives rather than the whole portal bit. Perhaps they are restoring Deja to Dejanews, the part that actually attracted visitors.
This sounds great other than the obvious problem of Google's search engine wouldn't really work for usenet. Google's engine works by rating the popularity of a page based on links from other pages, now unless I'm missing a way to link to other posts this isn't going to work well.
The only way to really rate popularity would be based on possibly thread size, or how many people visit a message from within Deja. I'm sure Google has a plan though.
> Degle or Gooja?
Good ideas indeed!!
Especially if you happen to know French, as they respectively sound like "Throw up!" (Degueule!) and "Boor" (goujat).
No, You can tell that they are ads.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
at http://groups.google.com/, it looks to be nicely integrated into the google search template.
Now I finally can reminisce by reading my old rec.arts.sf.written trolls and the beautiful flamewars that they caused (Heinlein fans tend to be a humorless bunch)
--
I second that.
Moderator please moderate this guy up, he's got a good point.
I hope we'll get a clean interface in the best spirit of Google tradition.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
but Deja's archive apparently goes back to only 1995, and that's about when the Usenet became essentially useless due to spam and poor s/n ratio.
That may be true of Usenet in general, but I mainly use Deja to do a narrow, targeted search. For that Deja can't be beat. Almost all of the hits from a well-constructed search are at least in the ballpark, rarely do I come across *any* spam or trolls. I've probably learned more about linux via Deja than any book I own.
the no
It has posts from '81 to '82
Zeshan
well if i were speaking in japanese it would probably sound something like :
google's such data acquiring's odds are what do you think?
Usenet was always a better place to search for product information (particularly bad stuff). What would have made that "before you buy" crap better would be tools to aid in narrowing down one's search for a particular product in their usenet archive (not everyone can figure out how to pick the right search terms ;P)
I can't imagine why anyone still uses AltaVista's front door when you actually your work done going through their back service entrance.
Well, there is the fact that they might sometimes change the link to Babelfish.
Think we'll see good relevance-searching of news posts based on referring posts? (Or did Deja already do that? I hadn't used it in a couple years)
How would you get the old net.physics
archives?...
oo-- dWs
I must say that I do agree but of course everyone really knows that Gopher is where it_is_at_! I've gone back to Usenet a couple of time recently looking for some stuff and must say it is looking better. Wish I had a mod point for you.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Mod up +52 Hilarious
I understand the importance of obliterating questionable and illegal material. But please be realistic. You think that it is Google/Deja's fault for being an outlet to finding this type of information? The problem is at the root.
If someone tells me that a kid on the corner is selling crack, and I buy crack - is it someones fault for telling me he noticed the kid on the corner?
-Pat
Perhaps it is time to start to explore alternatives, such as a redundantly distributed database supported by thousands of individual volunteer users such as myself. "Redundant" means that if one server goes down, it has essentially no effect. We've accomplished that with distributed computing; is a distributed database also possible?
The idea is to have something that would start slowly but eventually compete with Google. At the very least it would keep Google on its toes, which can be nothing but a Good Thing.
Also, these fricking people are using GET for sending sensitive data to a cgi, specifically, my password!!i n. py?userid=myusername&password=XXXXXXX&submit=Login .
Check it out(note to kidz: my password is not really XXXXXXX )
This is the login URL
http://services.google.com/cgi-bin/deja/maillog
This is a far from good sign. >:( .
WTF? /.ers had an aversion to big companies swallowing up the little guys? Maybe they just thought that until the Andover acquisition >:) .
I'd love to comment more than that but I cannot log in and access my deja account information. >:( .
I can't believe that there are people posting to slashdot that this acquisition is a good thing. I thought
Google just rocks my world, man. I am so glad about this news. Hell, I'd give my left nut to be able search those archives again. Good goin' google, just dont sell out too much like those cruddy ones did. Long live goole.com!!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
From the sound of it, this might be the first big consumer-friendly aquisition of all time...
Then again, if Google.com shows no banner ads, how are they going to keep Deja profitable (or at least break-even)?
------
Let me give you the lowdown
I completly agree. Many people are linking to the advanced search. However, the only usable "advanced" option there is the choice of language (which didn't seem to work for me). The new, hopefully temporary, interface is useless tripe.
I can't say that I agree. Yes, I agree that child porn is bad, but I think you're over looking several things.
1) When you post, "it" (I'm assuming you mean your news reader) puts whatever name, email, and company you told it to. This can very easily be 'Purple Eater' working for Sgt. Pepper.
2) When you post to usenet, there IS a solid record of who you "are." The post can be traced to an ip address, and the ip address traced to a person/computer. Who cares about a fakeable name and email when you have an ip?
3) Many free web based services add X headers to their posts and email that contain the orginating ip for just this purpose.
4) You're forgetting that anyone who really wants to will. They'll find a vulnerable box on a DSL running, hack into it, and run a console based mail reader - TADA! if the guy erases his footprints, he has an anonymous connection.
My point is, yes, Google should be responsible, and limits access to particular groups? Sure, no a problem now, but let's say someone complains about access to alt.sex.stories.moderated because of the occasional underage story?
...not that i in any way condone it, okay?
--
DeGoo_ _______
__________________________________________
_________________________________________________
"What's impossible today is normal tomorrow."
The least Google could have done was make the millions of current users happy by keeping the deja site working in the meantime (especially since they say it will be back up RSN.)
For once I'm pissed at google (my fave search engine)._ __
_______________________________________________
_________________________________________________
"What's impossible today is normal tomorrow."
Deja is one of the tools available in that almost useful search bar in IE. I wonder if this will be an inline to getting Google listed as one of the search sites.. That would actually encourage me to use it... Although the GoogleBar is still so friggin powerful it amazes me. ::GriN::
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
I think AltaVista has one of the best languages for searching and finding exactly what I want (+"sony laptops" +reviews -"for sale"). As far as usenet groups go, Deja was pretty good on the power search ("sony laptops" & reviews). Now, with the google interface, I have to just search for articles with "sony", "laptops", and "reviews" in them, definitely less refined than being able to combine phrases and booleans.
This is a major step back in usability to me. Are there any reasonable alternatives to Deja that have some form of a boolean search language??? Please!!!
-me-
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
A.Yahoo
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Google *acquired* Deja. That means Google doesn't have to worry about Deja's culture. They own Deja. There won't be any merger-type culture battles because Google will be calling the shots.
you can't end a sentence with a preposition, but it's very legal to end it with a prepositional phrase. So "sentences shouldn't end with prepositions" is very legitimate, as you would think. "with prepositions": that's a prepositional phrase. With, to, etc. those are prepositions.
How am I going to spread my links all over usenet?
Dangit!
LinkPimpz
Its been there for a long while, at least 6 months. Granted it doesn't work perfectly (sometimes it gets confused and shows you a totally different posting when you select the next in the thread) and occasionally it disappears totally for a couple of days.
--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Until we find a way to employ a bunch of programmers, managers and administrators in 9-5 5 day week jobs and not pay them a penny (not forgetting the cost of the servers, connection etc) then you'll find that websites have to be profit motivated.
Ideals are great, but if they don't make business sense, you won't have a business.
--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I kinda like it when not just anyone was on the Internet and you kinda had to know what you were doing to do anything. I guess that would have been before the advent of the World Wide Web (that they that so many people confuse as the Internet).
Ahh!! Incoming ethical debates, run run as fast as you can!!!. It would be so much easier if someone decided everything for us... oh wait, they already do...
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
Google-esque, hehe. Google-rip-off more like it. Good thing Google's look has changed (slightly), since otherwise Raging would look exactly the same (with different logo, &c.).
I'm a bomb regardless
what does this have to do with the acquisition of deja by google? google already has that info in their DB, and there are huge masses of folks on deja who distribute already-created child porn. the problem is already there - why does their merger somehow make it worse?
Steven
Software Wars
While they're at it, they should create a truly threaded interface for browsing messages in a group. Deja's browsing functionality was never all that great.
---
where there's fish, there's cats
I haven't actually bothered to check, but I'm sure there is already more than one web site which offers anonymous USENET posting in the tradition of the long-gone anon.penet.fi email service.
Even without such a service, any fool can simply put false information in the From and Organization headers. Of course, these posts be traced back to the originating IP address or ISP.
---
where there's fish, there's cats
try http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search its clean and lets you search thru any specific news group you want. I havent found. since its beta, i'm sure they will reinstate the dmoz style grouping hierarchy soon :)
-----------
MOVE 'SIG'.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Perhaps they can rename it back to "DejaNews". DejaNews - netnews for nerds, stuff that matters.
Does my bum look big in this?
Actually, I'm pretty sure the rule is: sentences with prepositions should not end, when I last chatted with Yoda, anyway..
--
.sigs: Just Say No!
They are currently dumping the Deja data into their own archive format.
We can infer:
- the old deja interface, which implies also all the many links to articles archived at deja, is probably gone forever - dead code.
- Google have bought the data, not the code.
- Google haven't yet written their interface - it will probably be some time before it appears. What we have now is a primitive fill-in.
- This inept timing suggests deja's demise was rather hastily decided.
Overall, I think this is a sad day for usenet. Deja was a useful service even to those using nntp based newsreaders - the ability to search all usenet headers for a particular IP address, for example, was a fine thing. The deja search was flexible and powerful, if you knew how to use it.Long term, Google may produce an interface as useful as deja's, and even without some of the annoying quirks - and if they do that will be great.
But you have got to question the abruptness with which they have removed the ability to post for thousands of people. (MailAndNews won't be getting any quicker anytime soon, I bet :-)
--
.sigs: Just Say No!
--
.sigs: Just Say No!
That's the way it was before Google aquired them. I'm surprised no one noticed before.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!
this can't be anything but good news.
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
They don't have any ads on their site, and as far as I know don't bump peoples sites up in the search rankings. Yahoo uses their search engine i think, but is this the only way they make coin??
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. --Robert Benchley
Google and Deja have had different corporate cultures since day one: deja has positioned itself as a bloated portal, wheras google has prided itself on being sleek and lean with inobtrusive ads. Deja tried to be everything to everyone, whereas Google tried to be the useful tool that users reached for when they wanted to get a specific task done.
These are completely incompatible philosophies, so which one can we expect to win out? I'm afraid Google might decide to become more bloated as a result.
But more important than that is how Google will respond to other criticism leveled at Deja in the past. There has been a petition floating around for the past six months demanding that Deja reopen its pre-1999 usenet archives to general access. Can we expect Google to comply with these wishes, now that the archives are in their hands? Or will corporate expediency force them to maintain so many of Deja's odious practices?
This acquisition will be a key test of how open-source culture can survive in the face of extensive funding. Companies like RedHat and TurboLinux have done so with more or less success, but their markets, no matter how much linux users may trumpet their operating system's virtues, have always been constrained to a small number of zealots who are willing to go along with some corporate changes as long as their operating system is improved at the code level. Google, however, is bigger than all the linux companies combined in its user base. It's aimed at the average internet surfer.
How long can we expect Google to stay the same search engine we've always reached for? How long until we have to switch back to Altavista or embrace the next young upstart who can provide what we want and need without the bloat?
-- Anne Marie
In the spirit of the 80's band Kajagoogoo... "Dejagoogoo"
It is, of course, quite cool, and it is quite obvious what is an advert and what is a legitimate search result.
When I read this headline on theregister, the first thought to go through my mind were "yes! yes! oh, god, yes!". I still feel that way. Google has done the impossible with me: earned even greater respect.
-- Steve van Egmond, b.math
Deja.com never had a threaded interface. It just tossed things together by subject header. A threaded interface would draw a tree based on the References: headers.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
As someone who was standing in the room at the time, um, well, I can't help you. But from the quotes on my wall, I'd put it as: "This is an impertinence up with which I will not put."
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Last I heard, archive.org had tapes of at least a few years of Usenet. I don't think they make the data available online, but if you ask nicely you can show up in the Presidio and play with them.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
This is not difficult to fix, because Dejanews used the articles' own message-id header. As long as Google provides a way to reference articles by that field, the worst case would be that you'd have to write a local proxy to rewrite deja.com urls to the appropriate google.com analogue. More likely, the Google people will get around to it themselves in due time.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
On your next foray into Napster, check out Swamp Thing by The Grid.
Then come back and apologize!
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Where does google get its money from, like someone just said, they dont have any ads on thier site (which makes it very nice, simple and powerful) but really.... whos paying for it? Some spoiled rich kid?
>here *are* pre-1995 archives out there. For years Deja had a page up announcing that they had aquired an archive back to 1993 and it was going to be up RSN. It never happened
How soon they forget.
I'll admit that their page made it sound like they were acquiring something new, and maybe there's even a good reason for that, but...
DejaNews *was* the Usenet archive from roughly 1993-1995. I remember the outcry they dropped all archives prior to (Aug?) 1995 because it was getting too big (I now suspect the older archives were indexed/databased differently and they didn't feel like bringing them up to the new spec for whatever new commercial plan they had at that time
My recollection of this is clear because Aug '95 was roughly when I went into a moderate shields-up anonymity (for personal reasons) and I was amused to see my hundreds of previous DejaNews hits suddenly diminish to a handful of "whatever happened to..."
That's really funny, I too am of Irish descent (and as my senior thesis at University, did an examination of semiotics and Irish naming conventions) but am not familiar with your surname. From what county are your ancestors?
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
One of the things I liked about the Jeremy Nixon deja search form-page (see my previous post above) was that it provided a back door to the better "Deja Classic" interface which they kept around after the new look arrived in '99.
However, that form now redirects to the main home page, and the Google interface which is great for Web, just isn't too good for usenet. The advantage of the "Deja Classic" interface was that it crammed a ton of the headers into a smaller space, the timeline was better, and it was overall easier to get a feel for which threads might be useful and getting into them.
The Google web interface just doesn't work for Usenet all that well. Please bring back the "Deja Classic" interface.
This is fantastic news! It's also great to see Google buck the web's current emphasis on so much "shopping" and back to good ol' information retrieval.
Also, in the Google tradition, it would be nice if they made the Deja interface quicker and simpler, kinda like this page:
http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/deja.html
NO SEARCH ENGINE I've ever seen, web or news, had the rich regular expressions that Deja had... I doubt that google will allow things like:
(pot|mj|hemp|ganga|bhang) & (prohibition|legalize)
The Deja archive/interface is a national treasure, and the National Guard should be called out to preserve it from all profit-seeking devils!
What are you talking about? At least until a few hours ago, deja HAD threading interface!
A few hours after my initial attempt, I tried using the advanced search. The options are sparse. The most important missing element is some way to date-limit searches. Until Google puts a date-range option into the search options, I have no use for their service. I don't even need to visit their site until they add that feature, because I can't use their service. I've been posting to Usenet for 5 years (about 2500 posts), and without a date-range, I cannot get recent posts (a post from December was the most recent post when I tried using Googles advanced search engine).
Nearly as bad as not being able to review current discussions is the lack of ability to post any new material to newsgroups.
Google is a great company, and I've enjoyed using their services. I can see that their search results are faster than Deja's. Unfortunately, "power without control is useless."
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I can think of several good reasons why this is a great idea:
- There is quite a good possibility the same caliber of advanced Google search algorithms and the use of linux clustering processing will be applied to the Deja archive, and, more importantly, the Usenet itself. Deja's service was fine in simple boolean terms, but as the archive grows there needs to be something much better than that. The result will be better quality percent hits == better results.
- Google will create popularity for the Usenet. As far as I know, this is the first major integration of a search engine with Usenet -- about time!
- The storage capacities of Google are much greater than Deja's could ever be, and with their web search frontend, the possibility for expanding is limitless. This means no more dropped archives.
- Google is very efficient at everything they do, and their HTML is simple, clean, and fast loading on just about anything. This will provide extended portability, increased functionality, and information usage efficiency.
(some) cons:
- The Deja threaded interface was good, a little bloated, but still good. Google's BETA interface, well, it sucks. Hopefully this will be improved. I would really like the ability to choose between flat view and thread on the fly -- ala old RemarQ and Deja together. Also, we will have to see how they handle the community model with posting and such. Should they go about creating an entire user community for Google or just for Usenet? There are cons and pros to both, however there are many possibilities which open up with this integration.
Hopefully the great information resource which is Usenet, arguably the largest online forum community on the Internet, will be preserved and taken to new levels by Google (similiar to what they did with the search engine industry).
Let's keep our fingers crossed!
Deja really kicks it. I've used it *so* many times for self-tech-support. I wish everyone knew about it. The information contained within it is invaluable.
This is great news. In case you haven't seen Deja in a couple of years, it sucks now. Google is just the company to go in and clean it up.
Actually, what I'm curious about is: why couldn't Google and other companies build their own usenet service? It's not that hard. Does Deja have patents (!?), or is the brand name worth that much?
I think that the search engine google is the best. It has helped me find the most important topics that I've required. Now in combination of Deja, Ohhh this is going to be a killer. News / fact/ counterfact's I can't wait to learn more.
Kick butt
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop music news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
I still view messages in the old way like in deja?... small font... no description...? Otherwise... THIS SUCKS!
--
Anyway, storage is cheap. I can buy 1 TB for less than 18.000 USD. A system with enough IO bandwidth to handle a horde of users querying it, on the other hand, is what will cost them most of the money.
...that they feel the need to rip everything down before they build it back up again. Deja.com was the most useful resource for troubleshooting... now they've disabled functionality, made the interface unwieldy, and generally are starting all over again. Why do that? Why not leave it the way it was, put up a beta site to test their new search engine, and put up the new site when it's ready? Makes me wish Yahoo had acquired them... Yahoo's acquisition and transition of eGroups to Yahoo! Groups was flawless. There was plenty of warning the transition was coming, and the transition itself was implemented perfectly, including the integration with Yahoo's user accounts
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
Rob should change the code so that if you reload the main page from the same URL more than four times in a minute, it automatically starts sending a static front page forever, until a 'quiet period' of, say, ten minutes.
Keeping ahead of site pests is a task that has a long tradition behind it. I remember running a WWIV 3.21 bulletin board. One of the users always posted with his caps-lock on, even though we knew he was on a termina capable of upper/lower case. So I went into the Turbo Pascal source code for WWIV 3 and changed it so that it did an automatic tolowercase conversion on any character typed in that wasn't preceeded by a space. I remember what fun it was watching the next time that user logged in. He dropped carrier out of frustration.
Those were the days. A 1200 baud modem and an 8088 box with 640K and a 5 meg drive were a virtual community.
GayJahDogs
*shriek*
It was a clean neat little service that allowed you to speak your peace online. It was there as long as you had a web browser and was far more portable than a dial-up account. I thought the searches were just so-so and the interface clunky, the whole thing would break a couple times a month and so you had to deal with the Real World (tm), but hey, it was free.
What I'm wondering is how long will free web-based access to news will last? I have a feeling it's on its death knell and its only a matter of time before free requires a 19.95 price tag a month. $9.95 after our $10 rebate offer!
Grayhaired
"Gah. I'm not the type to flame somebody for their grammar, but good god... What kind of sentence is this? What you thinking were?"
My sigfile goes, "The more harshly you criticize someone else, the more likely you are to be wrong yourself."
If is legitimate to say "What do you think the odds are?" then since the prepositional phrase "of Google acquiring such data" modifies the word "odds", the sentence as written is also legitimate.
Bob Clark
Well, posting through deja isn't really any more anonymous than using news reader, since deja still puts your ip address in the header of the post.
I agree, the threading interface was terrible, you had to click on every message in the thread if you wanted to read it.
I have not found any decrease in Google's accuracy. Can you back this statement up?
And do you expect Google to a.remain a business but b. not make any money? I do not -- but I do expect the quality of their service to directly correlate with their revenue, and I bet they do, too.
This is a great news. Dejanews was the reason I started using the web for the first time, many years ago, and remained a useful tool up until around early 1999. I hope that Google can restore them to their former glory.
The sponsored ads are quite obviously sponsored. Go check out this Google search on "new car" to see what I mean. At the top is a sponsored link clearly shaded and labelled. Below starts the actual search results. This system isn't like paying Google to internally change PageRank (their ranking algorithm) to give certain pages higher weight.
Are they planning to restore the threaded interface?
"An NNTP interface. They could even sell feeds. Imagine having a feed where nothing ever expires..."
I don't know how most of the current news clients would even handle that. Could you imagine browsing a group with a quarter of a million headers? Try changing from a threaded view to sorted by sender! Damn, my Netscape has kept track of 35,000 headers in one particular group since last year, and now takes ages to re-sort or just load its summary file.
Lookin' good there! I've always appreciated Google's focus on utility, and I think that Deja News was a kindred soul that got corrupted by the dark side (you know, that whole dot-com... thing.) Can't wait to see what the future brings... it's like a dream come true!
perhaps they will improve the daily emailing of headers.
:)
I would get a list of like 25 headers in a newsgroup that gets MANY more than that. It also would not let me remove myself from the list w/o a password. There has to be a better way (sending confirmation by email).
That would rock
Do a search on Yahoo and Google and you'll see the same results.
No, the results are quite often different. Yes, I know that Yahoo licenses Google's technology, but Google.com still returns different (and generally better, IMHO) results.
It is ironic that the biggest Usenet archive is now owned by a company that indexes the Web.
Ironic in an Alanis Morissette sense, or an Oxford English Dictionary sense?
No, it's the feeling that you've seen this 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times before. sort of like the feeling you get reading "i'm going to patent frivolous patents" posts on the patent topic, but not quite as strong.
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
But the "Damaged Links" you refer to are not damaged, they're stale. Deja generates URLs for their database dynamically, and after a while, they grow old and drift. I know, it's stupid. But once you realize that, you know that you can reload the forum page and then reload the thread, and all the links should work...
Of course, all that may be moot by now.
I can't think of a better adoptive parent for Deja's news service than Google; I think this is good news. But I'm really pissed they took down the news service - earthlink news servers went belly up (again!) last nite about 7pm, and so now I have NO USENET ACCESS. This bites. Earthlink's news service has really sucked the past few months... and now this.
I can see the fnords!
Yet everytime someone writes a web portal to usenet, they completely ignore the work that's been done before. AOL, Deja, Remarq, WebTV... no one pays any attention to the UI and functionalities that veteran usenet rats expect. They don't bother to go look into the protocols and etiquette of the community they're writing a gateway for. And all too often, this translates into their users being pariahs... to this day, many people on Usenet don't take AOL and WebTV users seriously.
And to make it worse, Netscape and MS write their browsers to post in HTML for chrissake... Oh... I shouldn't have even gone there... now I feel a Kinnison attack coming on... Not just in HTML, but one poorly-labeled option in Netscape makes it expectorate bothHTMLand plaintext... Ohh, Ohhhhh!
It just drives me nuts. Google programmers - if you're lurking out there, please - pay attention to the classic newsreaders. They know what they're doing. Don't try to reinvent the wheel or add any doodads.
We don't want fancy buttons and tricked out features
We want to sort messages in a newsgroup by threads, see who posted the last message in a thread, and at what time.
We want to be able to use the numeric keypad to browse through a newsgroup or thread. (For example, in Newswatcher, '5' takes you to the next screenful (or next message, if at end of message), '8' scrolls up, '2' scrolls down, '+' marks a message read, '-' marks it unread.)
We want a key or a button that marks all messages read ("catch up").
We want to be able to filter out (or highlight) messages based on header content and references.
And whatever you do, WE DO NOT WANT ADVERTISEMENTS INSERTED INTO OUR POSTS.
Sorry for yelling. But it is very important that Google gets this right; it may be Usenet's last chance on the web.
Thank you for your attention.
I can see the fnords!
Har har - that's indeed funny.
But it's the portal that needs a suckectomy, not Usenet.
I can see the fnords!
Of course they have a higher clickthrough and get more money for it.
Advertizers just *love* targeting ads. They want to spent their money where they have the most selling potential.
One way to do that is to track the customers' behavior to learn about the interests of that specific costumer.
Or, we let the customer tell us what information they want, and we'll deliver that *and* information from independent third-party sources on the internet. They can easily do that because they already have the search engine to search for any content on the internet. It just searches their ads database too.
That sounds like a perfectly cool business plan to me. The company keeps track of ads instead of user data. The few lines at the top of my search results don't bother me at all. If I wanted to, I could use Google as some sort of ads on request machine to get offers of whatever I want.
Besides that, Google is the best search engine out there at the moment. And, they use Linux
I'll tell you later.
(ever notice that they never did tell you? and, even better, why haven't they released it on DVD!)
Actually, I'm pretty sure the quote is "That's the sort of English up with which we will not put," the point being to make fun of the rule that sentences shouldn't end with prepositions.
I am very happy to hear this. In fact, on December 14, I sent email to Google suggesting that they get into the Usenet News searching business -- maybe even acquire Deja.com! They were obviously already thinking along the same lines since at least August 2000 when they started archiving Usenet themselves...
Google is awesome, and this only makes them better. I even believe they have the sense to avoid the portal path that AltaVista and Deja took to their detriment...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Hey, cut them some slack, okay? They've got the best web search engine out there, and I'm sure they'll have the best Usenet search engine in due time. But give them some time to get it rolling!
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Deja-ogle -- that's the service that lets you search the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* archives.
Speaking of... are there any services that actually archive the binaries too? I think I remember that Deja just strips binaries. Are they preserved anywhere, or are they forever lost into the ether? (Or just backed up on tape somewhere on a shelf in a machine room never to be restored again?)
Which brings up another point -- what about completing the archives? Are there enough backups left out there that the contents of usenet could be restored from inception on?
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
Seriously - I am.
Somehow Google embodies the Internet as it was and somehow continues to thrive.
viva Google!!
Actually I'm glad they dropped the pre-95 stuff...
there's a quite a few posts I made from 91-94 that I would like never to be read again!
Can you back that up? Privately held companies don't often release financials. If it's true, great!
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
True, Inktomi was basically a technology, and was licensed to may companies, including HotBot (later acquired by Lycos, BTW). But AltaVista was also licensed to Yahoo, yet became a portal anyhow.
Seems to me that if Google is buying companies like Deja, and is implementing posting and threading from their site, this becomes a destination site and not just a place to "demonstrate and test their search engine technology." I'd be surprised if Google packages threading and posting into a tack-on search product for portals like Yahoo.
Yes, protals are dead, but so is the illusion of a banner-ad-based revenue stream. How does Google expect to show profitability? My guess it's by doing something that users will find intrusive and diversionary and a portal, or a googlfication of the concept, is a likely place to start.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Just checked: seems the icky "before you buy" stuff is gone. Seems that google really has a clue: they actually managed to make the site less icky than it used to be! ;-)
They sold it to Half.com just after it was bought by eBay. And the cosmic dance cotinues, wtih companies going supernova and recoalescing into new companies...
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I'll actually hazard a guess here that the answer is "no". If we're talking about Deja, it looks to me like that plane was going down so fast (with both engines burning, noxious gasses filling the cockpit, etc.) that the cost-effectiveness of keeping up their web presence (which was not *that* cheap) was about zero. They knew they were going to assimilate the database, that the re-structuring required was massive, that their own current archive was possibly in better shape than the one belonging to a not-really-going-anymore concern, and that there was no point in waiting to kill off something they had no interest in supporting in the future.
I'll grant you that this sucks a bit, but I'll be willing to bet at least a little bit that the rapid crash-and-burn had at least as much to do with deja's deteriorating situation as it did with Google's arrogance/lack-of-planning/whatever. The Google press release on the Deja acquisition basically states that they acquired all of the "significant assets" of deja.com, which is a fancy way to say that this was not a merger, but at best a firesale, and that the insignificant assets are probably stuff like your former deja account. :-(
Babar
Huge wet sloppy props to Google. Now if they just get a news & stock ticker, I won't have to go anywhere else (well, except /. :) )
... because then your bookmarks could be called... dum dum dum "deja googled".
Actually, that should be a new l33t term for "been there, done that" for cool stuff.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
Dejagoo.com
----------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Errhmm, Deja has already been portalized long ago. All that icky "Deja before you buy" didn't exist initially. And expert search used to be easyer to find too. And the name: back then, it used to be called dejanews, a name which actually said what it does.
Just checked: seems the icky "before you buy" stuff is gone. Seems that google really has a clue: they actually managed to make the site less icky than it used to be! ;-)
No ads. Simple interface. Valuable results. No ads.
This is so cool. Now *this* I would put some money into an electronic tip jar. Google r0x0rs.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Let's go a little further back to the '60s!
How about Koo-koo-ka-joo?
I am the walrus!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Approval: 1
or
Approval: -1
This could later be refined with fractional values if desired, but the vast majority of Usenet's potential multiplied value could realized by just the two values (along with the absence of the header line implying no opinion rendered).
What such an open ratings standard would generate is the evolution of intelligent filters that recognized when when a message would likely be approved by a given reader/reviwer. This would allow people to vastly increase the signal/noise ratio experienced from their perspectives (as determined by their own rendered approvals correlated with others of simpliar perspectives).
Seastead this.
Let's hope Google will bring back the old features and interface :). I have no where else to go for good newsgroup search. Unless there are more that I don't know of?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
"Note to loyal Deja users: Due to time and technical constraints, it is not feasible for Google to maintain the interface and feature-set to which you are accustomed. We have been working hard to make this beta service available while we transition to a more full-featured offering. We appreciate your understanding and patience as we add the features you expect (including posting and better browsing)." --http://groups.google.com/
:(
I wonder how long this will take!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Does the Google version have the classic Deja search engine (http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml) ??? I don't like the new search interface now. :(
Anyone find it? Thanks!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
... because google already has a portal:
Google Web Directory
agree with that
:(((
It is more like:
"google's such data acquiring's odds what think ?"
(do omoimasuka, the subject is not even mentioned)..
but since no one seems to be interested in the japanese language on slashdot, your karma is still at 1...
Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Co
How about if they simply brought back the existing Deja interface (which works well enough for me) until they've got an interface with equivalent functionality to replace it, instead of the shit-stupid search-mode they've bodged into place?
How about if they got a decent interface together **before** announcing the switch?
How about if the announced the switch **before** it happened, so I didn't find out "mid-browse"?
All in all it's bollocks, and frankly I'd prefer *ANY* functionality to what they've ended up with!
I'm not counting my checkens yet. 'Stupid portalness' seems to be a disease that comes with age. AltaVista used to be pure, then went the portal route. The same goes for Lycos, Inktomi , and Infoseek.
I don't think your concerns are warranted. Google and Inktomi unlike the others you mentioned are primarily search engine technology companies. http://www.google.com is simply a way for Google to demonstrate and test their search engine technology. The website is not a major factor in their revenue model, licensing their technology is .
Secondly, portals are dead and have been so for a while. Besides AOL, Yahoo and MSN, nobody else is really successful as a portal. It would be extremely stupid of Google to jump on the portal bandwagon when so many people are jumping off.
Grabel's Law
Your post sounds well reasoned and carefully thought out. However, it doesn't have any basis in reality. There are still anonymous usenet services available, not to mention ways of hacking an NNTP server. Usenet is in general by FAR the most anonymous service on the net, and always has been. Web pages are less anonymous than even the old DejaNews posting service.
Also, let's not forget the purpose of usenet (and the web for that matter)--to _publish_ information. Simple distribution can be achieved via FTP, unindexed web sites, UUCP, P2P, and even mailing CDROMs.
This might facilitate the _re_production of child porn (although I doubt it), but even that will give the authorities more information to catch the perpetrators. I don't see that this would increase the _production_ of child porn, which is the real crime.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
While playing with google's new usenet "interface," I keep repeating, "It's only a beta, only a beta." It's not helping much.
My account is gone, except for email; and doesn't look like it'll be coming back. ('no new accounts will be created' sounds like posting will be explicitly anonymous.) The way search results are displayed is really bad. I can't post at all. The only stuff available is from August 2000 onwards!
Google REALLY jumped the gun on this one. They should have announced the buyout, put some stuff up on the deja.com page, and then left well enough alone until they were ready to go 'live.' They should know better than to give us this shoddy beta WHILE ELIMINATING the old deja.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Like others here, I am most upset at the folks over at google.com, one moment I and reading and posting in my subscribed groups, next I am some google page telling me what they have done, and what they are gonna do.
All I can say is they took away my freedom to post, and gave me nothing. But heck, it was free, so nothing lost, just my free business.
As for other web based USENET posting sites, I have not found a decent free one yet.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
DeGooJa
You can't handle the truth.
I think...
Well keeping the messages is imporant when your looking for a peice of information about some widget, so I rejoyce in that.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Google is already profitable.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
AltaVista did, at one point, fall from the purer faith. But then the clean, portal-less look of Google showed them the way, and they repented with Raging Search. Raging is exactly the same database and search engine as AltaVista, but with a Google-esque minimalist look. I can't imagine why anyone still uses AltaVista's front door when you actually your work done going through their back service entrance.
Right now with the "new" google-deja, I can search a the past 6 months worth of usenet, though the newest posts I can see are about 24 hours old. I can't post, I can't access MyDeja. Help! Time to move over to MailAndNews, I guess.
One of these days, I should put together a "bot" from which I'd grab a bunch of postings by these sorts of folk, build a sort of "parse tree," and then run a random number generator through it to generate pseudo-postings by them...
Let me guess, you're going to name it Mark Shaney?
So, when does the free ride end? Drawing people to free information just to see keywords or advertisements has to give out sometime...
----
Lots of it depends on your newsfeed. My ISP has outsourced news to Supernews, and the groups I read are 90% spam free.
This could be due to agressive cancelling/reporting, but I think it's mainly because the newbie idjots who buy things from spam just aren't on Usenet anymore, so the spammers have gone elsewhere. (Note that porn, as always, are probably the big exception to this and any rule you can devise about the Internet.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
A note on searches through Google: right now everything seems quite limited. It is only searching through the past year, and even the advanced search is lacking some of strong features of the Deja engine (searches through particular dates, anyone?) Hopefully they can get both parts back up and running, because I really want to see posts prior to 1999.
The thread system Google is incorporating though, in my mind, is much cleaner and a hell of a lot cleaner. Kudos for that too.
And lastly, more of a dumb request than anything: if they have the full Unicode data (I don't know if Deja axed or not when they were archiving the groups originally-- they might have) can we have the browser translate the dumb picture? Yes, some of its porn, and most people would go to the site just to see that, but there's also a lot of cool anime out there that's snuck under the web's copyright radar that I'd like to see. It sucks that I have to use www.thevalkyrie.com to get decent newsgroup galleries.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Now we all agree that pedophiles should be strung up by the thumbs, etc.
But what actions should we take, or should Google take, to handle this? Or should they remain "nuetral" in all of this?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Also, I assume that if I proceed with the links on the google page, when I return to that google search page the adlinks will still be there. The banner idiots never understood that constantly changing the ads just screws them out of a customer.
but Deja's archive apparently goes back to only 1995, and that's about when the Usenet became essentially useless due to spam and poor s/n ratio.
Er.. there are hundreds of thousands of regular netnews users out there with no trouble reading their favourite groups. Certainly, there's a lot of spam, but like most news sites, Deja applies all spam cancel messages issued. Anyone who thinks netnews is dead because of spam is kidding themselves. And the trolls are a lot more mature on netnews, as well.
Does my bum look big in this?
http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?cn=med
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
I cringe everytime I hear someone say that the net is a haven for pedophiles. It's a cheap way to get attention and make the anarchic parts of the net look bad and scary.
Perhaps we should amend Godwin's law to include Pedophiles along with Nazis?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Removing the sucking from the Usenet would be like playing techno on a banjo. I mean, come on...
More seriously: Maybe they can make Deja suck less (or at least make it as good as it was in the beginning, even if that was only so-so), but Deja's archive apparently goes back to only 1995, and that's about when the Usenet became essentially useless due to spam and poor s/n ratio.
Not that the s/n was ever so great...
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Don't kid yourself (no pun)-- there has been anonymous remailing available for Usenet for years (the attack on the anonymous remailers is relatively recent.) Deja makes an effort to record who you are, so it's not terribly anonymous. If you want to post anonymously (which is your right, according to most courts in the land), you'll find a way to do it.
Begin rant: And agh, I'm sick of goddamn child-porn being the number one justification for net-censorship. Yeah, I don't like the idea of guys getting off on pictures of little kids, and I think it's a great idea to go after the bastards who produce the stuff. But really, fighting a prohibition-style war on those few individuals with sick fantasy lifes is going to do a lot more harm than good. For every actual producer of child-porn snagged, hundreds of people will suffer unnecessarily: people who lose their right to anonymity and are persecuted for telling the truth about their employer, companies who try to protect their customers, innocent citizens who have their mail sniffed by Carnivore (sorry, DCS-1000SE or whatever), not to mention the thousands of people who were born with a deviant set of sexual preferences and-- thank god-- are able to confine themselves to getting their rocks off over nothing more serious than a few pictures.
Nobody will speak out against any excess necessary to prevent the distribution of child pornography, because even taking a stand inspires many people to view you as condoning the exploitation of little kids. Witness the recent uproar over virtual child-porn-- essentially, artistic representations of fictional situations. Law enforcement officials saying "well, unless you can prove that the picture is a fake, we'll have to prosecute." When we're willing toss out the most basic legal principles, who are we serving? End rant
The feeling you've seen this before...
10^100 times...
--Blair
NOOO!!! It is only with the declining popularity of the Usenet that many of the more egregious trolls and spammers have left (freqently to Slashdot). In many groups these days, the signal to noise ratio is back up to the pre-september that never ended days, especially since your average AOL user doesn't even know newsgroups exist anymore (not with that shiny pretty web thing to play with).
I much prefer the way Usenet is heading now, where you have to be at least a little savvy before you even find out about the Usenet.
It is really too bad that so many people were turned off of the usenet entirely a few years ago when the S/N ratio hit rock bottom, they could really help get the Usenet back to the way it should be.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
DejaGoo
---
--
One of the few downsides I can think of to Deja[News] becoming groups.google.com is that all of the old links to specific messages on deja.com no longer work. (For instance, if you knew the Deja ID number of a Usenet post, you could provide a URL and link directly to it.) All internal links to deja.com now seem to point to the front page of groups.google.com.
I guess people that practiced direct linking to Deja's archive are SOL for now -- the message ID URLs seem to be different.
Interestingly, Google's beta help page says that they've been archiving Usenet themself since August 2000...
The way I see it, Google really only gets two major things out of this:
- Stuff like trademark, domain registration, existing marketshare/userbase, etc.
- The database (interestingly, anyone with foresight and a lot of storage, could have built up a comparable one)
As for the software or the staff, I don't see why they would care. Everyone agrees that Dejanews has been pretty shitty to use. Writing a decent interface shouldn't be a big deal, even for one single programmer. Whatever programmers created Google, can easily handle this.BTW, since we're all fantasizing about Dejanews changes, you know what would be really cool? An NNTP interface. They could even sell feeds. Imagine having a feed where nothing ever expires...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'm not counting my checkens yet. 'Stupid portalness' seems to be a disease that comes with age. AltaVista used to be pure, then went the portal route. The same goes for Lycos, Inktomi, and Infoseek.
We'll see how Google goes about creating a profit model, but I loved Deja and yet they had to downsize and eventually sell themselves out, so it remains to be seen if Google will do something icky and commercial to avoid the same fate.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
DejaGoogs.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
I was thinking more along the lines of Hfuhruhurr. Nearly as comprehensible while reasonably approximating that classic "Usenet sound".
(Bonus points for the reference. I guess it would be topical to use Google to seek out the answer. Hint: Uumellmahaye.)
But there is reason for some optimism -- all the companies you mention went the portal route during those dark days of the late '90s when everyone on the Web suddenly wanted to be a portal-type-thing -- anyone with friends in marketing remember the brief flowering of the "vortal" idea?
I think that we might finally be past that particular nightmarish carnival of terror.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
Deja is bought by someone with clue!! This makes my day. No more stupid portal stuff, but an essential resource back online. Yes!
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
I think it's high time we get a new web-based usenet leader, and judging from Google's beta, I don't think they're going to be it. That's not a bad thing, mind you, they're already a great web search engine. That said, I propose the following challenge:
An opensource-based Deja-like setup funded by a single ad atop each page. I have no doubts that the slashcoders could easily set this up and perhaps some startup funding could come from Andover, if not from rich-as-all-get-out Rob Malda. Granted, it would be hard to get archives, but why not start clean? Would be bad for those wanting to search right off the bat, but time moves on fast enough. I think the community can do this! Give'er Hell, folks!
Their goal is to turn a profit. They are not a clan of monks who roam the countryside giving backrubs and writing search engines. Money makes the world go round and if you pulled your head out of your bag of granola for a few minutes you would see this.
p.s. evil is as evil does
- Toby
I don't know about the legal stuff, but Google has been a shining light among internet search engines.
The don't "wrap" their page around the searched page (e.g. Ask Jeeves)
They haven't lost their search functions amid a useless stream of portal "features" (e.g. Excite)
They are fast, fast, fast!
Their "I'm feeling lucky" option can sometimes introduce the user to new areas of the web that you never would have discovered on your own (and it doesn't seem to send you to pr0n sites inadvertently which is a nice feature here at work).
They didn't buckle under to the pressure and try to manually override their site after that "GWBush is a f-ing idiot" link issue last month. Nevertheless, this type of highjacking of a search seems to be very, very rare.
A quick test for "codewarrior" in their newsgroup search returned the first 10 of 10,000 responses in less than a second over my 36.6 connection.
If they can incorporate Deja with this level of expertice, I will be completely impressed. I don't think I've ever said that about an web company before.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
This and the AdWords program are text-based advertising that has "an average clickthrough rate 4-5 times higher than industry standard for banner ads" according to the Google advertising overview.
I've used Google adwords since it came out and was really surprised that it actually works. For the money they charge (around $15 cpm, lower if your ad appears in the second or third slot), what is essentially "just another banner ad" has given clickthroughs of up to 8%. The industry standard, by contrast is about half of a percent.
My guess though is that the reason adwords works is not because it's targeted or unobtrusive or any of the reasons they tout, but rather simply because it's a variation on the norm. Banner clickthrough rates were pretty good back when people were utterly fascinated by an animated gif. Then when you were able to interact with the ad people became interested again (punch the monkey, anyone?).
Of course people quickly become desensitized to every new advertising gimmick. Google adwords will most likely go the same way.
Here's a few places to look, though I don't know how much you'll find:
t /i ndex.html
s t/ newsgroup_archives.html
Archive for the History of Usenet Mailing list
http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.His
Where is the archive for newsgroup X? (an index)
http://www.pitt.edu/~grouprev/Usenet/Archive-Li
Archives of moderated newsgroups (not working when I tried):
ftp://ftp.sterling.com/moderators/Archives.html
Wouldn't that be the feeling you've searched this before?
Not to be confused with Deja-ogle, which... umm, nevermind.
steve martin. man with two brains, the. 1983.
what's my prize?
(and no, i didn't have to look it up on google)
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
The feeling you've seen this before...
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Degle or Gooja?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Google's interface for web searches is _useless_ for usenet.
Couldn't they keep the existing Deja functionality until they had something decent to offer? I can't believe how completely un-sympathetic to the needs of existing Deja users this sudden, and obviously not-at-all-thought-out, gutting of Deja is on the part of Google. I like Google, put they can't just shove Deja into their existing format and structure, leaving out 90% of the previous functionality, and expect everyone to just roll with it. And from what I could tell from the FAQ they have no real plans on making it any better anytime in the relatively near future. Quoting from the FAQ...
The least Google could have done is gotten their shit straight _before_ pulling this half-assed stunt.
[/rant]
I guess its back to real usenet servers and clients for me. I feel sorry for those that don't have access to a real usenet server, until Google gets its act straight on this.
Sadly, I don't see this buyout as a Good Thing (tm) for the open source movement. In the past year or so, I have seen the quality of both Google and Deja decrease immensly. Google's deal with Yahoo has decreased the accuracy of search results, and Google's interests seem to be turning towards profit rather than accuracy. Deja has been demonstrating similar signs that they are "selling out". Linux, and open source in general is supposed to be "by the geeks, for the geeks" and with this trend towards consolidation, and corporate profiteering, I am concerned that these two once respectable sites are losing site of their once-noble goal, and becoming unable to relate to the average Linux user.
This is a question for...PSYCHOLINGUIST MAN!
To be completely serious, this is a perfectly grammatical sentence. Indeed, I think it would make my Good Buddy Robert Kluender beam with joy. Now, is this kind of thing a piece of cake to parse? No way: it has what we experts call an unbounded wh-dependency. Indeed, our willingness to torture^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htest undergraduates with stuff like this is why we make the big bucks.
Now, to prove to you that this sentence is legit, consider the following:
Does this help any? Now, the real interesting question is why people would tend to say (4) above as What do you think the odds are of Google acquiring such data? But I have office hours in five minutes, so that question will have to wait for another day. ;-)
To make this just remotely related to the topic of search engines and Usenet, I'll point out that long distance dependencies like this one are the kind of thing that can make it infuriatingly difficult to use easy cues like "lack of proximity" to decide that two search terms are truly unrelated to each other. Unfortunately, solving this one requires you to parse natural language as it is used on Usenet, which is truly a frightening thought.
Babar
I remember the hue and cry when Deja announced that they were dropping the pre-95 stuff. Is there an archive of the stuff from the late 80's to 95 available, and if so, what do you think the odds of Google acquiring such data are?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
They don't even use advertising ontheir site?
Yes they do, just not annoying advertising. Try typing airlinesinto Google. You get two sponsored links. This and the AdWords program are text-based advertising that has "an average clickthrough rate 4-5 times higher than industry standard for banner ads" according to the Google advertising overview.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I like the way my password is part of the url when i log on now!
- 2001-02-12 16:30:09 Google acquires Deja's Usenet Service (articles,news) (rejected)
(bah) I'd like to say that this is definately a good thing. I use Deja a lot because I don't have decent Newgroup access at work and I've found many problems with the site over the last 6 months:- News articles that have disappeared
- Huge gaps in postings (often space of several months)
- Pointless "innovations" - like that annoying product link
- Damaged links (where you click on message 2 of a thread and end up in a totally different thread)
- Increasingly slower site access (advert overload anyone)
as well as the really annoying problem where once in a while all the postings go flat (rather than threaded) and it marks all the postings as new even when I read them 7 weeks ago.What I hope Google don't do is just rebrand it, bolt on a little bit of additional code and be done with it. I personally think it needs a good clean up with much of the crap removed.
What I also hope is that Google do it fast, because at the moment I don't seem to be able to access anything but my my-deja email, which is only used to let me avoid the spam from the harvesters.
--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Google is by no means an innocent and fully open engine, but they have made many quality decisions. Taking on Deja has to be considdered an overwhelming accomplishment. There is simply no way for any other party to supercede this. Essentially, Google has the Usenet Monopoly.
What Google must now do differently is to re-create the hype that Usenet was before the fancy graphics of web pages. The only way to do this is to get more awareness out there for usenet.
I wish them the best.
But for now, I wish I could search usenet for perl right now, and use threads.
.. if only.