How Google Saved USENET

Masem writes: "Salon has a well-written article article on the recent revival of much of the USENET archives from '81 to '90 by Google. It mentions that much of the recovery was thanks to years of work in transferring data off 140-some 10" magnetic tapes (~120megs of data) to a more conventional format in order to recover much of the early posts. Even a reference to the previous Slashdot story is made." Update: 01/07 23:52 GMT by T : btempleton adds: "O'Reilly Network asked me to do an article on similar themes and rememberances of USENET history." Thanks, Brad.

Comments

Title give an impression.

[ImaLamer]

I think the title of the story should be How Google Saved USENET.

Yes, google saved the historical record of the USENET, but it needed not to save the USENET from anything else. USENET is alive and well.

Didn't search USENET as much before Google.

[reaper20]

Google Groups is awesome, especially when searching for some obscure piece of hardware advice or settings.

I don't have to worry about getting and setting up a news client, and it's just one tab over from my default search engine.

Google did save USENET for me - though I never post, searching through all the linux and comp newsgroups is usually faster than looking up a HOWTO.

groups.google.com always has the answers...

[ThomasMis]

As a software developer, no matter what problem I run into, somebody else has already run into that problem and has asked my question and recieved an answer on groups.google.com. Whenever I get stuck on anything at all, it's the first place I run to. groups.google.com is the single most useful site you can point your browser (konqueror!!!) towards. I'm not sure how they make money over there at google, but what a great service they are providing!

Re:groups.google.com always has the answers...

[aussersterne]

This is absolutely true. I am often asked "What book(s) can I buy, to learn what you've just told me? How do I gain the knowledge in [subject X] that you have? I don't care if it takes me a decade, I just want to learn it, but I can't seem to find out where. Is it written down?"

I tell them: it is a decade's worth of learning, and then some, but not from books. It is all from USENET. I became a competent C programmer who writes more efficient code and makes fewer fundamental mistakes thanks to usenet. I learned to use BSD and then to use Linux as fast and furious as I can type and to get myself out of any system problem, save my data from nearly any corruption thanks to usenet. I am able to network these odd things, build these robots, and have this "cool stuff" that you like so much that works so well thanks to usenet. I can make nearly any computer go, now matter how old or wierd or what media or operating system it uses (a feat which makes you a legend in your own department) thanks to usenet.

It's not my knowledge... I humbly picked it up in the mid and late '80s and early '90s and still constantly refer to it, first through Deja and now through Google. It is our knowledge, collective and stretching backward in time. To ever lose the news archive would be a tragedy -- the amount of searchable data on everything from chemistry and biology to computing and electronics to literature and politics is truly stunning. With the news archive, you can learn to hotwire together any two things so long as they have *wires* to do something useful; you can learn to brew just about anything including some of the best beer ever; you can learn just what the HELL James Joyce is talking about at times in Ulysses. Every question has been answered before you even asked.

The only sad thing has been the degree to which the groups have been turned into a boulevard of endlessly flashing neon porn signs in the last few years, almost to the degree that anything else is drowned out by the brightness.

Study USENET. Use USENET. Live and learn. Amen.

What kind of backup is used now?

[msolnik]

I was wondering what kind of backup googles uses now for all its info? What happens if one day a script kiddie breaks in and rm -rf / all the boxes? Do they have tape backups? How many etc. I also wonder how much they spend on it.

Save the posts

[Kefaa]

I am sorry they will allow requestors to delete their own postings. While we might wish it otherwise, 10, 20, 50 years later, this may be the real historical value. To purge, seems the equivalent of having a letter to the editor removed from newspaper archives.

To those who feel like "they are walking around with their baby picture stapled to their forehead", we all mature. What I thought at 20, 30, and 40 show how I grew. What other archive in human history can provide the transitional opinions, discussions, and outright imbecilic flames wars?

While we would hate to have someone pull out our post in support of the flat earth theory, to act as though we all believed the earth was round is rewriting history. Convenient for us, but misleading to the future.

The question now becomes, what happens after Google and Slashdot, when the archive is tera-bytes large? Will it take 100 years for the next conversion?

Re:I've really got to wonder...

[frank_adrian314159]

I can't imagine there is much money to be made off the technology, because it's all text - the same search tech applies. So, as far as I can tell, there is no business reason to be doing this.

If you build it, they will come...

The old USENET posts are an information archaeologist's garbage heap. If information has any intrinsic value at all, this is the place to find treasures. Just because some folks see dirt doesn't mean there isn't gold to be mined.

Re:Google/Deja has killed USENET, not saved it

[BlacKat]

Erm... Usenet is a PUBLIC system, any and all posts you make there are in the public domain.

The information is preserved for posterity, not for making money or other commercial exploits.

I can't really believe you think we'd be better off destroying information instead of preserving it!

Message forums (Slash) are killing off Google.

[BrookHarty]

Allot of the good gurus are moving over to slash ran message forums. Talking to a guy who is a perl guru, he has moved most of his perl help requests from usenet to Perl Mongers. I've been seeing this trend in the last few years, as independent subjects are moving over to a website based web forums. I even spend more time reading 5 mailing lists and a dozen message forums, and dont touch usenet anymore.

With these message forums and mailing lists not linked to a usenet group, there is a lot of wasted knowledge that is not shared. I would love to see a slash-mod or some type of mailing list enhancement that posts a overview or some kind of daily message post to usenet.

The whole idea of usenet was knowledge sharing, not binaries and spam ads. Glad google has saved usenet, but some effort needs start using it again.

Humm, Maybe Slashdot should enhance a usenet forum? Thou 5-20,000 posting a day on a usenet might be a little much. Maybe only 2+ posts make a moderated usenet group.

The Usenet archive is not saved yet

[osswid]

Google is a private startup. They might still go out of business, or be bought by someone. Even if they have a successful IPO, these could still happen later.

What happens to the archive when they're bought by someone else, or end up in bankruptcy court? Will it go the away of the online digital photo storing sites, vanishing one day without a trace, taking irreplaceable data -- data of immense academic historical interest -- with it?

Google should promise to donate the archive to the Library of Congress, do the transfer now, and make a social contract with the net community to turn over the reigns on this project if they're acquired or go out of business.