Slashdot Mirror
Google Revises Usenet Search
michaelmalak writes "Wednesday night, Google Groups announced in a thread the rollout of their revised 20-year Usenet archive search engine. Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post. See the announcement thread for others' reaction." An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet has published some interesting insights into what makes Google tick. In this lengthy article, Google's vice-president of engineering, Urs Hölzle delves into the nuts and bolts behind Google's operations, what back-up mechanisms and hardware setup is in place and even some interesting homegrown technology like the Google File System (GFS)."
Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
Well damn - I hope they don't "improve" it too much more.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
What the hell? That was probably two of the most useful features.
Damn you google!
I have been on it this morning with various results. I am getting alot of server errors. Additionally, the preferences doesn't allow me to change it back to the old format. I don't like the new format personally, and won't be using it.
Neither have you
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
"Spelling: Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does. The amount of computing power available at the company means it can afford to begin teaching the system which words are related -- for instance "Imperial", "College" and "London". It's a job that many CPU years, and which would not have been possible without these thousands of machines. "When you have tons of data and tons of computation you can make things work that don't work on smaller systems," said Hölzle. One goal of the company now is to develop a better conceptual understanding of text, to get from the text string to a concept. "
Next up: Grammar and Content
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features? What the bearded terminal hackers at Google giveth, the bearded terminal hackers at Google may taketh away. Certainly, if we can embrace their advertising as the GNU/Linux community has done en-masse, we can understand that they have their reasons for these changes.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
(Gathers canned goods, candles, heads for cave)
Carousel is a lie!
The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.
A random search on http://groups-beta.google.com/ gives me the same result.
Please please. I use search by date all the time! Please give it back. Pretty please!
Why would you remove the search by date function? That is insanely useful when you are looking for posts about a particular product, especially tech products where you might only want the most recent posts, or you might be searching for an oudated product.
the first link gives a 500 server error. darn it
Among the various 'improvements': ability to search by date has been eliminated, as has the ability to deep link to a single post.
Jee, nice "improvements"... I personally have linked to individual posts on a web page summarizing a lawsuit I was involved in that was directly related to posts in a newsgroup. I know others who have linked to posts in similar situations. I just checked my web page and the links to those posts no longer work.
Google just took a HUGE step backwards in my opinion.
Luckily the rot hasn't spread to the national Googles yet, so you can still use Google UK if you need it.. at least until they ruin that too.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
The article states:
- Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
- Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.
- Over 30 clusters.
- One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.
- Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.
- An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
- No complete system failure since February 2000.
Now, 2,000 machines in a cluster, plus 1PB data, plus 2Gbps in a cluster times 30 clusters comes to:
- "Over" 60,000 PCs (!)
- "Over" 30PB data storage
- "Over" 60Gbps bandwidth
Also interesting:
- An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
- No complete system failure since February 2000.
They changed this on me last night right in the middle of using it for some research. My biggest pet peeve is the separation of posts, or lack thereof. When their search term highlighting kicks in and highlights a bunch of words, it's hard to tell where one post ends and the next begins. I'm NOT a fan of this new design. At least they should let us choose the old one!
Try to search for a number using Beta and you'll see how broken it is.
Also, it creeped me out to no end discovering this morning that my Gmail cookie is really a "Google Accounts" cookie which will now be attached to my Usenet forays via Google as well. I personally don't want the line between public and private conversations to be muddied like that, and I definitely don't want a unified cookie straddling both domains.
Finally, the interface leaves a lot to be desired. The layout is cluttered and junky now whereas it was clean and simple before. I'm not enthralled by the Javascript hooks. Threading seems to be worse than ever (and still not done by message-ID or References - when I asked Google why this was via email, the response was "too difficult"... *boggle*) and the CLI-esque search ability is degenerating into a GUI mess; where one line of text and a CR would before get you to the page you wanted, it now can take that plus several additional mouse gestures and clicks.
This is a sad day, to see a useful tool become so f**ked up for no apparent good reason. I can only hope and pray for a reversion.
this sucks, I really liked google groups as it was and i was hoping they dont take their groups2 and throw away groups1 :(
:(
plus now we lost the tree view on the left so it is hard to make out what is in reply to what
aah short some google stock..
One petabyte of data in a cluster
Uhh, ok what is a petabyte? Is that like half of a veggie burger or something? I'm guessing 1000 Terrabytes?
Well, this is obviously an outrage and all.
I know this is a liiiittle bit offtopic, but here's a story about how the little guy (or little country) can still reach a huge company like Google and get them to change something.
> Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:04:02 +0100
> Hi,
>
> I wanted to post a question to Google Answers,
> but my VISA credit card was not accepted,
> because its expiry date is 09/12 and you only
> allow up to 2009, not 2012.
>
> How do I solve this problem? I live in Denmark.
> I use the same card to shop on the internet all
> the time.
>
> Kind regards,
Hello Jakob,
Unfortunately, because the expiration date is not listed on our billing page, we must ask that you use a different credit card.
Sincerely,
The Google Answers Team
> Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:00:27 +0100
>
> Dear Google Answers Team,
>
> That is the only credit card I have. This is
> very unfortunate, but since others have solved
> the problem, I'm sure that so could you?
>
> Regards, Jakob
Hello Jakob,
Thank you for your reply. We will extend our expiration date options. The
billing page should update in 24-48 hours.
Sincerely,
The Google Answers Team
So still: HURRAY FOR GOOGLE!!!
-- jaf
Hey, I can't reach the site, it just gives an error. Have we really slashdotted google??
from "Don't be evil"?
I'm on the side that doesn't like the new format. The first thing I found is that the thread view is missing. Now it just gives you the entire thread without the outlining the different posts. You can't jump to a particular post in the thread anymore.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Excuse me, but their Google Groups feature is based entirely on profiting from others' work (and copyrighted work at that). If you're providing a properly searchable index, you might (might) have a public interest defence to the copyright infringement. If you're providing a useful service, most people might (might) not mind you using their work. But if you're going to take away useful searching facilities and provide a service that doesn't even allow proper citation (i.e., deep-linking to a specific post), you're going to be both unpopular and almost certainly breaking the law. I don't know about you, but personally I don't have much respect for people who are either of those things.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The new Google groups can only please people who care more about how it looks than how it works. The older interface was a step down from the Deja interface, which was higly concentrated, and now this BS. As much as I love Google, I hate them for messing this up with their pastel-everything BS.
Ill wait to complain till I verify it myself. However, if it is true it is another recent step of googles Im not really fond of.
My biggest, and only real complaints is them helping China with their Internet Ban.
Absolutely. With so much spam and repetitive information on Usenet, I've always limited my searches by date.
And linking to a single post is the whole point. I know it costs money to keep that stuff online, but surely they could find a way to put ads on deeplinked posts.
Google just used up all its goodwill with me.
sigs, as if you care.
Although the the Google Groups advanced search page at http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search no longer lets you filter searches by date range, the advanced search page at= en still does.
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search?hl
Trying it last night, I was unable to post through it. When I got to the "preview" or "post" point it kept sending me back to log in again. Once I did that I was confronted with another blank form to write my post on! Besides lack of date range search, it's not clear to me if author search remains. That would be horrible. There is at least one improvement: posts are added to the archive as they propagate to the Google servers. In the old system, they were collected throughout the day but then only added 4 or 5 times a day. Note they also munge email addresses in an attempt to, I guess, stop harvesting. I haven't been able to check it out fully since it seems to be broken already.
This is a disaster. I have hundreds of links to usenet articles via the old google groups. Those are all dead now. There is no browsable hierarchy of "groups"; no real message threading; far less info on a screen; what a mess. Google groups became my primary interface to usenet and my favorite aspect of google. It seems that google has completely lost its sense. This is one hell of a killer mistake by google.
Hmmm, I guess this means it may be easier to still find all of that crazy s**t I wrote back in college when people actually used their real names on the internet! Uh oh...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
search by date is the most useful feature when searching about many topics, often limiting the search to the last 2 years (or excluding the last 4 for example) yelds the results that one is looking for much more easily.
I have bookmarks to specific articles/threads it took me a long time to find and to which I refer now and then and if they stop working the usefulness of google groups for me will be much reduced...
As much as I understand why they would want to make USENET look more like a message board for people who never really grew up with it (usenet and gopher were mostly all we had back when I first went online) I still think that not having this functionality available for people who know how to make the most of it is very backward thinking.
-- the cake is a lie
Usenet has been rended so useless by spammers and trolls I barely use it anymore. A shame, really. When google figures out a way to get rid of the trolls, they'll have my attention.
http://fromthemorning.blogspot.com/
I noticed earlier that groups.google.com was redirecting to the "beta" version. I was hoping it was a temporary screwup. If you try using it, you will as well.
:
I'd like to take a moment to relay my calm and well considered reflections on the new interface
Hey Google! What the FUCKING FUCK do you think you're doing? Are you trying to outdo Yahoo in the cluttered fucking uselessness stakes? Perhaps you were getting too much traffic and wanted a way to discourage people from using it too much? Well, if that's the case, it's going to be an outstanding fucking success! Why don't you just hire the people that came up with Ask Jeeves and have done with it? Come back Dejanews, all is forgiven.
For the time being you can still access the old interface through www.google.be. If anyone wants me I'll be over there in the corner trying to learn Flemish and sobbing quietly to myself.
well, not me since I never bought into their "do no evil" hype..but the rest of you who did are a big-ass bunch of st00pid suckers.
It seems to me that Google has decided to make Google Groups their own private message board and are relegating usenet newsgroups to the back room. The old interface let you easily drill down through the usent hierarchy (alt., comp., sci., rec., and so on). With this new (less) improved interface they've pushed the usenet groups off to one side. From the main page there's now a " Browse all of Usenet..." option at the bottom, and if you click on that you get taken to a page where you can select from an alphabetical list of newsgroups. They couldn't even be bothered to keep the same easy to use hierarchical method of navigating groups.
I wonder how long it'll be before Google simply drops the usenet portion altogether. Probably just as soon as their own private groups reach a critical mass and they decide usenet isn't worth the effort any more.
Not only does the new google groups beta refuse to work (cannot see a post even if the search works), but the old groups.google.com is now redirecting to the new (non-working) engine.
Grumble.
And what's with the tab for 'add a new group' - are they planning to any user to unilaterally create new usenet groups? Or are they planning to make usenet indistinguishable from their own (yet another bulletin board type) forums?
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
This is astoundingly bad. Losing the search by date is a catastrophe. They've even outdone Orkut on this one. This is such a huge step backwards that I'm starting to think that Google is a transient lucky accident, not some sort of brain trust. Are they doomed to future failure?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
When Google first bought up the old DejaNews archives I was ticked. They took something with which I could get the information I was after and returned something with which I could not.
Over the past few years they finally got it back to being something useful. I had heard about this "Make It Into Yet Another Glorified Web Groups" effort, and was less than impressed. But as long as it didn't interfere with it being a decent Usenet search engine...
No sort-by-date and no direct-article-linking? WTF? So if I want to get only the most recent posts for a certain query or if I want to pass someone a direct link to a specific post then I'm now SOL? How is that an "improvement"?
Is there anywhere else with an exhaustive archive of Usenet? I think I'm about to jump ship. I neither need nor want another web-groups option, and I want more search flexibility rather than less.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
.... the +2 insightful moderation or the notion that your comment implying that intelligent people should essentially bend over for their "superiors" and accept whatever they may do passively and happilly could possibly have been intended not as humor, but in earnest.
... we have nowhere else to effectively go ... then we can and should bitch about it, loudly)
Their bread and butter? Without us (the millions of people who use google rather than a competitor) they don't have a business.
I read your post and thought I could detect a tongue firmly in cheeck. I don't know what is more disturbing
Or is everyone's stock answer to anyone's criticism of Our Corporate Masters(tm), or anyone's demand for corporate accountability not just to their stockholders, but to their community, their customers, and their resources (us, as it is our clicks and our eyes they are selling to their advertisers) to "go out and start your own company and stop criticisizing Our Greatness(tm)"?
On a more serious note (and I only feel compelled to say this because so many moderators obviously aren't getting what I believe you intended as a bit of wry humor), our president, our congress, and far too many common folks (on slashdot and off) may eagerly fall to their knees in the presence of their corporate masters (and may indeed race one another to do so), but some of us remain free thinkers and expect to criticize any organization, profit-driven or not, when they misbehave.
And crippling a service to increase revinue is certainly misbehaving, whether or not that service is "free." (Our clicks, our eyes, that they are selling and making billions off of, are also free. If this exchange becomes unequitable because of Google's dominant position
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
One thing that's horrible, is trying to find a group in the new system. I was looking for news.admin.net-abuse.email. (Fortunately, I have it bookmarked.) After going to "news." from the top-level Google Groups page, I was taken to a category selection page that included things like "Arts & Entertainment" and even "Adult". There are no such groups under the Usenet news. heirarchy. And under those categories the individual groups are ordered in what's probably their Google PageRank order, not alphabetically, not by size, not by any obvious means.
The big change seems to be they are integrating the Usenet archive with their own Groups stuff, and the two really aren't the same.
It stinks. I don't like it. Not just because its new.
Google has become corporate. Now they'll start ruining the things that made them great. Whats next, banner ads?
It is absolutely clear to me that you cannot have the computing power google has and not expect it to produce complex behaviour.
I fell pretty sure google is the first step toward the cyberpunk world.
(I for one welcome our new artificial intelligence overlord)
Maybe it's just that I rad the article while listening to "Delete Yourself" by the Atari Teenage Riot (worth downloading, I swear)
This is what happens when you trust one company to maintain anything you need/want access to. It doesn't matter how 'nice' they seem, or how 'cool' they've acted in the past - there's no guarantee they'll continue on that course.
I just tried out the updated site. The look and feel is about the same. The differences willl take some getting use to. I am normally impressed by all the new features I find at google.
1. Click "Show options" near the top of the message.
2. Click "Show original".
3. Copy URL from Address bar, use as needed.
Here's the obligatory "Obligatory summary of obligatory slashdot replies":
- In Soviet Russia, government searches YOU!
- In Japan, Old People talk to Google.
- In Korea, Old People are talked into Google.
- Imagine a beowulf cluster of Googles!
- Imagine a beowulf cluster of clusters of Googles!
- Hot grits, Natalie Portman, ach mein Leben!
Add your own official inofficial Slashdot meme and get some hot grits from Natalie!
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
You can still do a deep link to a single article, if you like....
Navigate to the thread, for example this comp.arch thread. Choose the post you want to link to, and click on "Show Options". Two of the options are "print", which is a link to a "printable" version of the article, and "Show original", which is a link to the article with all the headers.
One more step (or simple URL hack) from this display is "view parsed" which gives a friendly HTML version -- for example, try this link.
Technical Difficulties
Google Groups is experiencing technical difficulties at the moment.
We're working to resolve the problem, but until we do, you won't be able to post new messages or change group or individual settings. We're sorry for the inconvenience and hope you'll try again later.
Is it just me, or is Google getting closer and closer to the dark side of the force?
Simpy
I hope you have all noticed the fact that this is BETA, I repeat, B-E-T-A BETA. Nowhere has google said that these changes are permanent. They are just testing stuff out.
Write your local Google Execs and tell them you demand your right to deep link!
if you get a lot of hits even if you do this you won't be able to go too far before google will complain: it's not very hard to get lots of hits on broad queries even if you limit by group.
Also now you wouldn't be able to do things like, for example, if you were interested in it for historical reasons, searching posts on Freddie Mercury's (or Ayrton Senna's) death for the month after it happened.
Not to mention that when you sort by date things are not sorted by relevance at all, which means you likely will get A LOT more crap you have to wade through: limiting by date means that you can ignore time periods you're not interested in *AND* still sort by relevance.
-- the cake is a lie
This is just in the beta version of DejaGoogle. These features are still there in the current production release.
You can even still deep-link with the beta. The URL format looks to have changed, though, and you have to work a bit harder to get a page showing only the relevant article (show options->show original, and optionally show parsed).
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Google Groups in Latin
"Mandata referre quae missa sint a" still works.
We have so much time, and so little to do - strike that! Reverse it. Tryn Mirell
Well, there goes the ability to search for prior art on usenet. The patent sharks ought to be happy.
What happened to the Slashdot that I used to know?
/. cheered.
/. shrugged and said "no big deal, Google is different"
When Google introduced the turd that is Orkut,
When Google introduce an email service that read your mail and setup social networks to pump ads at you,
Did everyone forget that Google represents the true path? Usenet is so 1980 anyway, the new Google groups is the future!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Let's take one of the most useful pieces of the internet and make it completely useless! I for one hope that they spin it back off into dejanews. First they took out the ability to set it up like a web-based newsreader, specify the groups that your interested in and it tracks what you've read and what you haven't. Now they get rid of the last good features that it had and give it a totally counter-intuitive interface.
I still can't find a way to just go to a specific group directly.
pffth.
matt.
Maybe MSN is reading and can put these 2 features in their google clone.
Hmmm, I'd say the load testing has commenced. Thanks, Slashdot!
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Gmail Style is nice for Gmail, but not sure if I like it for google groups.
One thing for sure it is definately beta. Nothing seems to be working. getting either 404 or 500 errors for almost every page I try. (I don't beleive we could have slashdotted google)
This sucks.
First DejaNews becomes a portal p.o.s. then GoogleGroups removes HALF the functionality from Deja, now Groups2 removes all the rest of the functionality of DejaNews!!!!
And Groups dumped half the newsgroups and alot of the newsarchives Deja had! What kind of stinking archive is this?
And there's no alternative either! AltaVista removed their group search years ago.
I had a link to usenet post in a recent blog entry. Try this (sometimes there's a server error, but otherwise it seems to work). The trick is to click on "Show Original" and use that link.
Yet Another Web Site
Functionality: You can still link to a specific article.
UI: They really need to put the separators back in between postings. Just having the author's name highlighted isn't enough.
That is so Borg. Not a network to colocate in unless you turn LAN booting off!
They'll change it back to the way it was when someone goes and tells them they've made it taste like MSN Search.
Google has now jumped the shark.
Quick! Everyone go to the "show options" link on the thread that announced the new Google Groups. Make sure you report this announcement as Abuse!
the implicit linkage of your gmail account to your groups account is somewhat inconvenient.
1024, actually...
:)
Yeah, I know I was just being lazy/inaccurate. You can accept innaccurate numbers on your hard drive boxes, but not in a slashdot post?
tsia
I noticed the change this morning before their servers went down. It sucks. I did a quick scan of the other search engines and I don't see any similar usenet search. Excite only tells me to turn on javascript. Even Altavista no longer has usenet.
This is what happen when you don't have any competition.
Does anyone know if Google.com is the only searchable usenet archive out there?
Search services (AltaVista, Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb, in fact all that I can think of) have dropped the ability to make truncated searches. For English that's only a minor inconvenience. For languages with many tenses or cases (e.g. Russian, Spanish, or Finnish), lack of truncation can make the search service darn near useless.
I'd sure love to hear the rational for all these downgrades. Or, better yet, have the funtions restored.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You are wrong. You are not on the new Google Groups page. There is sort by date, but not search by date. You want to look at groups-beta.google.com, not groups.google.com.
Really? I don't see it.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hm... they've just fixed original deep links, and put back the old Groups page... the power of /. witnessed?
The new interface sucks: I really don't know what else to say. In particular, it wastes a huge amount of space with message previews that I don't want to see: rather than getting maybe 50 threads on a page, I now get maybe a dozen. Ugh.
You're guessing right. Peta = 1000 Tera = 10^15. Wikipedia is your friend.
I figured it was, either 1 or 2 levels over Tera, really I just wanted to work in my PETA joke
So, where do I go instead? Where else has a large usenet archive with proper threaded searches?
Cheers,
Ian
I was actually lucky enough to visit a datacenter in the southeast united states (which will remain nameless, but if you do a little searching, Im sure you could figure it out) where Google colocates. I want to say they had something like 18,000 square feet just for them, behind a partitioned wall. We were *not* allowed back there, despite my pleading.
Anyway, as we were walking around the 150,000+ square foot datacenter floor, when a guy came by, pushing a very odd looking rack.
It resembled a bread tray, 20 shelves if I counted correctly, with completely naked main boards sitting on them. It looked to be 4 machines per row (counting the power supplys). Each had one IDE disk sitting on a gel pad, strapped in with velcro. I personally watched them wheel 4 of these racks right by me back into the dark "Google" corner of the datacenter. Our tour guide finally gave in.
Him: "Well, you've seen them now!"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Him: "Thats google!"
Definitely the highlight of my day!
Erm, probably should have said "a lot of CPU to sort" instead of search. Some estimates indicate that 20% of all CPU power worldwide is used for sorting.
I probably also should have said RTFA but RTFM sort of works too.
If everyone who posted a comment took out 60 seconds to send a complaint message, I think it would make a difference.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
we should, like, DO something... groups-support@google.com
I guess it's HOW you linked to it in the first place.
Just so everyone knows, as of right now you can still get to the old search:
http://groups.google.com/
Wow! They're changing things as we speak. A minute ago, www.google.com had a link to the beta groups search. Right now, it has changed to a link to some intermediate page that now redirects to the old groups search page (which now has a link to the beta groups search).
Is this in response to the Slashdot effect? Or are Google employees reading the complaints on Slashdot?
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1. Google goes public. 2. Things start to turn to shit. Is this the beginning of the end as demanding investors obsessed with profitability tear down everything that's great about Google?
Google Groups Beta contact/support
Please, contact Google and complain.
Searching by date and linking to an individual post were the two most useful things about Google Groups (other than it existing in the first place).
Let Google know that you don't like the changes.
Does anyone else have a workable alternative? I suppose that I can do my own usenet feed but....this sucks.
Google is running linux, and they got 60 computers fail per day. We microsoft is totally running windows, we have 99.999 percent uptime. Wait a minute, who is the user "H3llrun3r" on my box?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I just went to the main US site. From there the link takes you to the old Groups site. On that page there's a link to the Beta page. The new interface isn't forced on you and, as other people have mentioned, there still is a section of the new site devoted to Usenet. All in all, it doesn't look so bad. Of course, it sounds like this might have been changed just from when the original Slashdot post was made.
I don't care what they mod you, that was funny.
dude that's pointless, the anonymous user doesn't have the threshold set low enough (-1) to see eesrimm (or whoever's) -1 post.
stupid stupid stupid
Untill i tryed google.com. Google redirects me to google.ca unless i click the google.com link on the .ca page.
.ca page, you can still filter by date range wihtout problems. Maybe this is going away soon tho who knows.
Anyways, on the
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
You're obviously trolling, but in the interest of myth-dispelling: under most jurisdictions, everything you write is your copyright by default. What matters is any permission you give (implicitly or explicitly) for it to be copied, and any exemptions to which someone copying it without permission may appeal (e.g., fair use).
There is an implicit permission for something you post to Usenet to propagate and stay around for a few days. Whether there's an implicit permission for others to archive those posts, and if so whether they are then allowed to reproduce them for commercial purposes without permission, is an untested question (but there's little or nothing in statute law to support this position in most places).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It switched back to the old style in the past 30 minutes.
I wonder what the rationale was behind this move. I doubt that date searches and deep linking are affected their bottom line in any meaningful sense. This seems like they went out of their way to screw their users without any resulting benefit to... anyone. I personally feel that the date search was by far the #1 most useful feature in Google groups. It's the reason why I use(d) Google exclusively for newsgroup access. Now, what's the point? I wonder what Barbara Abernathy thinks of all this. That cow.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
This is incorrect. It's still possible to link to a single post - it's just the old URLs for a single post have now broken. For example, http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=E_-cnfXDhMqTV rTdXTWc-w%40speakeasy.net&oe=UTF-8&output=gpla in, which used to be a link to a post in alt.fan.cecil-adams has now become http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.fan.cecil- adams/msg/99339841838c82ea?dmode=source.
Next to every post in a thread is an options button. One of the options is "Show Original", which links to a single post, with all original headers intact.
I'll miss the ability to search by date, though.
there must be google spys in our midst. Start using the /. code words. :-)
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
No "deep linking"? That's not exactly "evil", but offering a "web services" model, while "stealing" everyone's contributed Usenet content for fun and profit, then stopping people from linking back into that public content, is kinda evil. Google's execs have clearly chosen the standard Web vulture model: you are required to watch the commercials. Hopes for an enlightened "TV Guide" search for TiVing are now dashed.
"There comes a redeemer
and he slowly too fades away
There follows a wagon behind him
that's loaded with clay
and the seeds that were silent
all burst into bloom and decay
The night comes so quiet
and it's close on the heels of the day"
- Grateful Dead: "Eyes of the World"
--
make install -not war
Although the "groups" link on the www.google.com page goes to the new interface, http://groups.google.com/ still works, and takes you to the old interface everyone prefers.
.@.
can someone tell me how to get on Usenet. I've searched the internet and all I can find is that it's a newsgroup. Is it free to start or do I have to pay? Someone please explain a little about it..
I have officially bit off my foot after putting it too far into my mouth. In my country, only old people really RTFA in soviet russia with hot grits. Have a nice day.
Oh, man...I am in a badddd mood this morning because of this. I woke up, turned on my computer and went to look through the groups that I frequent and was appalled at how things have changed.
I've been using Usenet since the 1980s and switched over to www.dejanews.com when they started (1994? 1995?) because it provided a nice summarized interface with the search options I needed. I also know that most ISPs also offer NNTP service so I can read Usenet via that, but doggone it, Google groups was just too darn good and I got used to it. However, now that they seem to have broken it, I guess I'll have to get "tin" or some other newsreader going and use my ISPs "official" Usenet server.
So unfortunately, Google has lost me (and any ad revenue they may have gotten from my views) because of this change.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
NO YOU CAN NOT!!!
Perhaps you should take your own advice and RTFM.
You linked to Google Groups Advanced Search. This is the old search, which is still operational but probably will not be in the future.
Have a look here. Notice the "beta" in that URL? THAT's the new search page which just went live. Take a look at it and you'll notice that there's NO DATE RANGE.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Yeah, you can throw out whatever acronym you want, but you can still SORT by date and you can no longer SEARCH by date, which is the reverse of what you posted earlier.
http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request. py
If you don't like how they've changed it, let them know about it. If enough of us do it, maybe they'll do something about it.
Jeff
would that be one big petafile?
My query was "dotnet attribute obsolete", but the new Google Groups changes it into "attribute obsolete | obsolète OR (dotnet dot-net)". And by doing so it adds results I don't want it to. There seems to be no way of disabling this 'feature' );
Oh please, please, PLEASE give me the button for "less commercial results". I might even be willing to pay for it.
OK, I've seen the claims of loss-of-functionality posted here, and I've seen both the "Mr. Google" post and the beta itself, and I have to say that, while the beta isn't as good as the current "Google Groups", it's not as bad as has been claimed here.
One claim (here) was that you can't view a thread as a 'tree'. This is false; you just have to select the "View as Tree" link at the top of the thread. This results in the familiar two-paned view of the thread that permits you to see the relationships between posts, and jump to particular posts of interest.
Another claim (here) was that there was no "usenet group" list. Again, false. Just select the "Browse All of USENET" selection at the bottom of the main page, and you get the usenet newsgroup hierarchy selection, just like old "Google News".
Cant link directly to single posts? Nonsense. Here's a single post within a thread from the beta. I agree that getting the link is cumbersome (you find the post you're looking for, click the "show options" link against that post, and then select the "Show Original" link that appears), but it can be done.
But... you can't search by date.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
... but you can order your results by date - so I'm still happy.
Let them know.
Contact google
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
then add support for binaries and nntp access
as it stands now its bloody awful, there was nothing wrong with the GUI in the first place (except (i)frames suck) but then again this is software so gotta keep re-inventing that wheel to justify the employees existance
Appearently the onslaught of 100,000 whiny geeks has caused them to rethink their changes. For a while the www.google.com page was linking to the new google groups beta. But now it is linking to the old google groups interface. This is at 16:05 GMT.
Implementation details of the Google File System can be found in this paper by Google engineers.
Not really evil, perhaps just some bad judgements. Perhaps this Slashdot discussion will bring some of the design mistakes to light.
Who was the idiot that started this rumor?
Each message in a thread has a named HTML anchor, try this for instance. It will show the whole thread, but position you at an exact message in the middle.
The only problem is there is no easy way to get this URL, you have to find the anchor by looking at the HTML source (Firefox's "View Selection Source" feature helps a lot).
Also, if you click on the "Options" link by the individual message, you get a "Show original" link, which shows just the message, verbatim.
And from there, you can click on "View parsed", and see just the pretty message, without the rest of the thread.
So there's your deep-linking. I agree it's not obvious how to do it at the moment, but the ability is obviously still there. Give it some time, it's still a beta!
These quirks and the "Server Error" bugs are to be expected, they'll work it out.
As for the new browsing interface itself, I kinda like it. It integrates and borrows some stuff from their excellent Gmail interface.
It hides quoted text by default (you can expand it with single click), so you don't have to scroll through some morons quoting of a whole message just to add a few words, it keeps a history of groups you recently visited, it allows you to bookmark topics you are interested in, etc. I do find it an improvement over the old interface.
The only thing is the missing date search, I agree there, that was definitely useful feature. If enough people complain, maybe they'll bring it back.
Also, someone else complained that you cannot browse by group anymore... bullshit, it's staring you right in the face, it's the "Browse all of Usenet" link.
Google serves their shareholders now, not you. It'll take some time for it to sink in. People are so used to google creating and exploring new ideas that benefitted you and I.
Not anymore folks, Google is big time.. they have to do whatever and anything that is necessary to profit their shareholders. Not you, not me, not slashdot or any geek community.. they are corporate america incorporated.
Will people quit modding the parent up? +4?
He's wrong, and not informative at all.
Because of this, the IEC has proposed the term Kibibyte (KiB), Mebibyte (MiB) (and so on) to refer to the power of 2 system, but this doesn't appear to be catching on.
Gee I wonder why. Mebibyte? It sounds like ebonics. As in,"mah dog is hungry so he Mebibyte?"
I have nothing to back this up, but I swear I got better results from deja than from google. Generally this is related to searching against API functions for win32 drivers. *shrug* Who knows. But I still miss Deja.
Pax -- Ob
and apparnetly date...but wait, they've just pulled the beta version and are back to the old format!
Yes, I got it wrong. They didn't change the link at the top of the other google pages as far as I can tell. I consider myself spanked for today.
It looks like the old interface is back. That experiment didn't last very long.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
When I go to www.google.com, the "Groups" link now takes me to the old interface again. From there, the link to groups-beta.google.com is still shown as "Preview the new version of Google Groups".
Is this the case for everybody, or are they selectively displaying the new interface only for certain visitors?
The Google Blog posted and then deleted an entry on Google Groups 2, which has been saved in my feedreader.
"Are you interested in learning how to build a bird house, or discussing Linux with other partisans? Or maybe in your spare time you want to make single-layer graphene sheets using Chemical Vapor Deposition.
Whether your interests run to knitting or brain surgery, chances are good other people out there share them. The new Google Groups not only helps you find information on millions of topics; now you can actively share ideas and opinions with others about each and every obsession of yours.
And if you don't find a group already focused on your passion, by all means start one. Invite others to join your group so that all interested parties can read and respond to messages, share opinions and ideas via email or your own group's web page. If you're looking for a group to join, we could definitely use some thoughtful insight (or idle speculation) over at my space elevator group.
Shannon Bauman
Associate Product Manager, Google Groups"
Perhaps they realized that their link to "how to build a birdhouse" was to a post where 6 out of the 8 links were dead. Kaput. Or maybe proclaiming themselves as "Linux partisans" does not fit in with their "don't be evil" mantra, or their shareholders best interests.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Yes, I got it wrong. They didn't change the link at the top of the other google pages as far as I can tell. I hereby consider myself spanked for today.
This is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen. Are you reading this Google? What the fuck it wrong with you? Why the fuck would you remove features such as date search and the dotted lines that helped you navigate threads more easily????
This is the kind of assinine bullshit that Google HAS NOT engaged in in the past and has made it successfull. What the fuck are you thinking with this crap?
I use google groups on a daily basis to help find information. USENET is one of the most valuable resources on the interenet and I was very scared when google took over. I did not like the interface at first, but I got used to it BECAUSE IT INCORPORATED THE IMPORTANT FEATURES OF THE DEJA INTERFACE. Now you are removing features which are absolutely critical to making your USENET archive functional and useful to people. Get your fucking heads out of your asses and put it back the way it was.
might be redundant by now but try using google groups from google main page. ;)
The advanced search is now beta advanced search Note the beta. You link to the old google group advanced search but i guess you got it from your bookmarks
LTFA; Learn The Fucking Acronyms =)
Yes, I got it wrong. They didn't change the link at the top of the other google pages as far as I can tell. I now consider myself spanked for today.
Yes, I got it wrong. They didn't change the link at the top of the other google pages as far as I can tell. I do consider myself spanked for today.
You're an idiot, right? Open your eyes to -1 posts not showing up for anonymous users by default. Big whoop.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
I submitted the Slashdot story at 8:30am EST. At that time, groups.google.com went to the Beta. Now at 11:15am EST, groups.google.com is the old version, and the Beta has been relegated to a "Preview" link. Sometime in between, Google changed.
I grabbed a random link just to checks g/0199acd16249079c?dmode=source
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Gmail-Users/m
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Yeah I got it wrong, just mod it as offtopic or whatever.
Right here you can see it...
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This may be a little off-topic, but it's been on my mind recently so I thought I'd mention that I recently blocked Googlebot from my website. Why? Because they were using a new version of the bot that was requesting pages WAY too rapidly, as in tens of pages every second. This new version pretends to be a "real" browser (using the "Mozilla (compatible)" format). The old version (User-Agent begins with "Googlebot") was also present, and requesting pages politely. I think this new version was part of their recent effort to regenerate their index and "deep scan" websites, because it was shortly after this that they advertised their index doubling in size.
There were other issues as well as the rapacious spidering (which reminded me of some of the worst spambots out there), but I won't go into the details here. I didn't get any satisfactory resolution from Google when I tried contacting them.
Website suicide? I don't know. All I do know is that Google seems to be fulfilling my biggest fears - they are going downhill as they get bigger. Funny how the bigger a company gets, the more it tends to suck. Also, having an IPO is never a good thing, in my experience - it always leads to short-termism and corporate decisions based more on the bottom line than what's actually good for the users. Sure, any company has to look after its shareholders and investors, but they never seem to really grok that being so focused on the short-term negatively impacts things in the longer term, particularly if it loses you goodwill in the userspace. Also, as a company grows you do tend to get the sort of braindead, clueless decisions coming out that we apparently see here.
So now we have Google restricting what we can do with old Usenet posts... didn't they buy up all the archives for this stuff a while back? This would appear to give them some amount of power, but also (they should realize) responsibility as stewards of the past. This is not something that they are simply indexing on someone else's website, it's data that they actually own. But in this case it's not really their data at all - it's the community's.
Google seems to be slowly using up the goodwill they built up since 1998 when they came onto the scene, a small, fast, simple, charming and relevant search engine that kicked ass. Why can't a company just keep doing what it does well, and be satisfied with that? Why does everything have to eventually grow, expand, gobble up other companies, and then inevitably start to suck?
Never mind... for now, Goodbye Google.
Since when is removing usability and usefulness included in the working definition of progress? Shouldn't the general mission statement for the whole of all technology be to improve upon the capacity of human beings to educate themselves and relate information to one another? How is this progress?
It is still possible to deep link to a Usenet post but they've done a pretty good job of hiding it.
On a topic page, (say, this one), use the 'show options' link and then hit 'Show original'. The raw Usenet post appears in a new window. You can use 'View Parsed' to see a more nicely formatted version.
Thanks to the submitter for dwelling on the negative...
:)
On a more positive note, there's a lot to like in the new groups interface. My favorite is Atom feeds. Bringing Usenet into the 21st century, if a couple years late.
You can still deep-link, but it's a pain. If you click the "options button" in a post in a thread then "show original" you wind up with a URL to a single post.
Further to my original reply:
Just becasue you can verify what I already know does not mean everyone knows or condones this.
And. it IS NOT exclusive to negative posts. It happens to pos. post too (deffinately)
You are such a moron - just go and vote Republican again or somethin you human waist pot..
In the new feature, you can reply to a usenet thread online.
One of the problems with Usenet is that its use is declining... The other is the horrible spam.
Getting people to reply to threads is way better for usenet as a whole (which IMO has much better content than www right now for programmers).
Still, the ability to view a single message bothers me.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ken+weaverling+s pam+usenet+first&hl=en&selm=9v6d5h%245pg%241%40new s.dtcc.edu&rnum=1
According to Ken and his search of google, I was the first people to ever use the word "spam" to refer to unwanted electronic communication. Obviously, I did'nt know it at the time and was quite surprised to learn of my "fame." Yeah, that and $7 will get me a cup of mocha-something, I know.
Anyhow, the whole point is that Ken's reserach was aided by the search by date feature. It will be a shame if that is removed.
(And for the curious, I changed my name from Czarnecki when I got married.)
I dont disagree with you entirely but the options that now have to be twiddled were, more or less, default in the old system. They worked well because they were common-sense choices that flowed nicely with the way one used groups (usenet). Putting them behind other options just doesn't make sense.
who are we to question the removal of features?
We can question whatever we want to: this isn't the Soviet Union. You may consider it gauche to question a free-as-in-beer service, but I have to disagree there, too. Google is not a charity and their service is a business venture. There are a lot of services that are free-as-in-beer that are ultimately just loss leaders or attempts to monopolize a market. If Microsoft gives you your first copy of Windows for "free", don't you question their motives? If someone walks up to you on the street and offers you cocain for "free", don't you question their motives?
Whether something free-as-in-beer is good or desirable depends on the motivations of the people offering it and the consequences its acceptance has for you. I think the jury is still out on whether Google's free-as-in-beer services are actually a good thing or not.
Perhaps you'd like to start your own archive of the USENET message boards?
Actually, I would like Google to stop their archive because I think it sets a bad precedent.
Google's argument is that those were public electronic conversations, so there is no harm in republishing them. But think about that. The same argument applies to public conversations in real life: you don't have an expectation of privacy. So, it should be perfectly OK for Google (or anybody else) to blanket cities with microphones and cameras, use face recognition and people tracking software to identify individuals, record every interaction and conversation, and make all that data available searchable on the Internet. I don't think that's a good thing, and even if you want to argue that you like it, it definitely represents a huge change for how things operate, and that's not something a company should just be able to decide on their own.
It seems they've changed back. I too went to google groups late last night (this morning?) and was horrified at what I saw. Bad formatting and layout, missing features, etc. I'm glad to see that it is now back to its old self. Hopefully it will stay that way. Berj
my ball bag. This is horrific. They've completely fucked up groups. I hope those fuckers roll it back and give me back the old one. If they wanted to piss away some of that IPO money they should have sent me a check.
Hint: click the "About this group" button...
... or should that be deja-news? Remember when that site changed for the worse?
The new system sucks. No fixed-width fonts by default, that horrible floating group name at the right of the screen when scrolling, a far slower user interface (it was slow when I first noticed the change about 7 hours ago). I can go on.
They'll be underlining words with links next.
For me, the groups link on the front page links to the old groups.google.com, and the groups link on a search result links to groups-beta.google.com
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I agree 100%: Google's use of USENET groups almost certainly constitutes copyright infringement. I think the only reason they haven't gotten sued is because there is little money in that (hard to prove damages).
But that doesn't make it alright. DejaNews/Google's actions were arrogant and selfish, and they have had a profound effect on USENET. Anybody who posts to USENET under their own name these days is a fool because they will have to live with whatever position they took for the rest of their life. That is very different from the information discussion forum that USENET was supposed to be.
If you're that concerned, use multiple browsers. Multiple identities within one browser doesn't really work if you want to be able to use both at the same time, but Mozilla and Firefox are separate and will run at the same time with no problems.
fencepost
just a little off
If you don't register your copyright, all that means is that there are no additional penalties for copyright infringement. But that doesn't mean companies can blithely infringe your copyright.
Furthermore, you don't have to register before you publish: you can register whenever you like, and any copyright infringement that happens after registration is fully actionable.
I suggest you get a better lawyer because your lawyer seems to be a complete moron (more likely, however, you just invented the lawyer and you yourself are the complete moron).
http://www.google.com/search?q=slashdot
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
They can and usually spell the end for start ups and small companies. Large companies can absorb a few bad ideas before they succumb.
//measurable// on the company itself.
That leads to the problem where you have really large companies. Some of their bad ideas, like this one, can have a large impact on many users but not show a direct effect
There is a reason why many large companies have an internal motto along the lines of "We make money in spite of ourselves"
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The other one had 7. Somehow arbitrary, since alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female.genitalia.lar ge is one of those.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Well, I supposed it makes it easier to hide the stupid things some of us may have posted (especially in university) to Usenet back in the 80s and early 90s.
;-)
Amen... I posted some stuff to Usenet in the early to mid 90s that, given the choice, I'd rather weren't around today. Mainly due to their naive and juvenile nature...
Problem with Usenet nowadays is you *know* it will be archived, and for that reason I use it much less (also because of the worse signal:noise ratio). When I do, it's never under my real name (last did that over 3 years ago), although I use a plausible sounding pseudonym because I have nothing to hide.
I don't even tend to use the same name for different accounts (so if you see a 'Dogtanian' elsewhere, it's someone else). If someone wants to find out about me, they probably can, but not just through a 30-second search in Google groups.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The existence of the X-No-Archive header suggests that implicit permission is given to archive.
The X-No-Archive header was created around 1995 in response to criticism of emerging web-based USENET archives. Therefore, at best, you can only argue that such implicit permission exists after the date of its creation. But Google archives posts going back all the way to the early 1980's.
Even then, however, it is questionable whether for DejaNews to create an opt-out policy for archiving is a sufficient defense (among other things, the "X-" prefix indicates that it was not an official part of the USENET protocols in the first place).
See how far you would get if you said "Disney, unless you put a red X-No-Distribute sticker on your DVD, you grant me full rights to redistribute your DVD over the Internet".
Let them know that you are not happy with these 'improvements'.
Another nice new feature of google groups:
Ads that make your code unreadable!
My quality social news site.com.
To me, that sucks a lot more than their cutting off of the deep linking. I don't want someone searching my name to find a presentation layout that effectively puts other people's words in my mouth.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Another thought: I only regularly search a number of select groups that mirror my interests. Is there anyway I can download ALL of the threads for a particular newsgroup over the last year say? This might not take up so much space for some of the groups I use. Then I could have a nice local copy that i can search myself.
Is such a thing: a) possible? b) legal?
Re the deep linking, what they changed is that the old "view thread" link is gone, but the link to the article now displays the entire thread (not just the one post like it used to). You can still link to a # reference to go straight to one article.
It's a good idea, but they waste too much space on the left and have poor color choices.
So what you're saying is that we need an open-source style "usenetforge.org" equivalent to groups.google? I wonder if Google would be willing to sell/donate a copy of their archives to the community.
Now appears to be a "manual" option.
Type author:NameSought in the search field and it returns authors in all groups matching your query.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
1. Everyone with a GMail account emails themself 1GB of usenet posts
2. Write new web interface to retreive posts from GMail accounts
3. ???
4. Profit!!
google has jumped the shark.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This actually makes it much harder to get things done.
Looks like they're pulling a Microsoft. Fortunately, I can still get to the old system.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
When will the author read the "Searching 8,058,044,651 web pages" at the bottom of google home page? Though, he is techincally correct as 8 billion is more than 4 billion.
I was wondering if it is possible to use wget to obtain a local copy of some usenet groups. any thoughts?
and figured out that many people were trying the beta, not liking it enough to trouble to send feedback and just switching back to the original version.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I've got some links on my web page to old usenet posts, and they still work for both groups.google.com and goups-beta.google.com. Also, the groups-beta advanced search lets you retreive any usenet post by message ID. You can link to the new-style URLs for individual messages. What is everybody complaining about?
That's an good idea. Other useful capabilities for advanced search:
Google may end up becoming a major player in spam control, because they process large volumes of mail through search systems and can potentially recognize almost all bulk mail.
I know comcast is switching over all of the old ATTBI accounts to giganews at the beginning of the year, and the quota for existing giganews accounts (legacy comcast accounts) will be going up to 2 gig a month, with free headers. Err thats just annoying, 2 gigs is barley worth it for reading newsgroups let alone downloading from them :-(
If they took out the search between date function, that would make google groups usless to me! I have recently been doing quite a bit of research on old computers and GUIs. Some keywords would return zillions of matches after 1990 or so and the most relevent data is before that. Sometimes I am looking for comments about something that happens on a certian year (like a specific release of software - earlier or later comments are unlilkey to be relevant). Sometimes it is important to actually find the earliest posts without wading through 20 years worth of garbage.
I can understand why they wouldn't want people do deep link to them, some people should copy information to their own sites if they want it served up. But I really think Google could reach some kind of compromise such as inserting a big ad on pages that are deep linked.
Because of this, the IEC has proposed the term Kibibyte (KiB), Mebibyte (MiB) (and so on) to refer to the power of 2 system, but this doesn't appear to be catching on.
Because everyone damn well knew what "kilobyte", "megabyte" and so on were supposed to mean, and the only reason the meanings "changed" was because some fuck in marketing saw a good excuse to inflate quoted hard drive capacity.
Do you seriously think we'd be having this conversation if that hadn't happened? Yeah, you can nit-pick that kilo et al should only apply to powers of 10 (or 1000), but the 2^10-based system makes a hell of a lot more sense in a computer-based context. Since it was created with kilo meaning 2^10x, and so on, it would have been better to stick to this.
If the computer manufacturers are so damn keen on the "correct" use of kilo, why the hell aren't they selling memory by the kibibyte, or quoting the capacity in "true" kilo-bytes?
Simple. No-one knows, or cares, what the fuck a "kibibyte" is meant to be, and since memory has to come in something approaching powers of 2, to quote it in true kilo-bytes would (a) Sound *stupid*, and (b) Confuse people who wondered what those weird non-standard sticks of memory were, and buy the competitor's brand instead.
So; the manufacturers use whichever definition suits *them* best, and really, only pedants care about kibibytes.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It would be interesting to see if an independent project, perhaps set up like SETI@Home, could work as a good search engine.
You'd probably make a better case against him if you knew how to spell and speak full sentences correctly. That was just miserable.
When searching, I do not care for the new default view of all posts on one page with no indication of the order, I found the tree view easier and better for reading.
They do provide a tree view option when searching and use it by default when not doing a search, but in both view cases they also removed the boarders/info that used to separate each post, which makes the threads harder to read and follow.
And the only minor annoyance I can see is that so far is when searching clicking the link gives you the full thread, unlike the old version where you could either select the single message or select to view the whole thread without keyword highlights. The good thing about this change is that what ever keywords you searched for are highlighted throughout the whole thread.
If google was going to change anything, it should be that obnoxious posting contract. They can do anything they want with your post (if you use their interface) including changing it, displaying it, selling it etc.
You basically assign your works to google under a public domain type license. They are free to do whatever they want with it.
The gmail is not like this! Why are the groups?
Did you think about the possibility that it's a fake googlebot?
I already have an archive of around 600 million messages (nearly everything sans binaries from 2000 till today; just a couple of terabytes) and intend to create a public Usenet search engine. As I am using Usenet myself on a daily basis, I know what *I* want in a Usenet search engine, and that's quite different from what Google gives us.
Here's how you can help: Contact me at martin-k (at) softmaker.de if you have a private collection of Usenet postings that you want me to put in the database.
-mk
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
At least they extended their archives back to the 1980s. In the good ol' days, even the trolls were better. My nomination for Greatest Troll Ever .
I obtained access to Usenet around 1984, and participated in various groups until the early 1990's, when it simply became too much. For a long time I didn't care a lot about Usenet, but I was excited when Google presented their 20-year archive and I could read my own postings of the past (one of them had even made it to Google's 20-year Usenet timeline, May 1986).
While Google may legally own the digital collection as such, the copyright to individual postings remain with their authors (unless otherwise noted). Therefore, Google isn't free to do as they please with the collection, and they know it. Individual authors who object to Google archiving their postings can request them to be removed, if they can demonstrate that they are the real authors (or acting on their behalf).
I don't mind seeing my postings reproduced in verbatim, even as all the e-mail addresses I have ever had on Usenet have been rendered useless by spammers (I have disabled the addresses one by one, the last one as late as this past summer). Google's attempt at masking those addresses now strikes me as utterly futile. Do they believe that the spammers will trash their old address collections and replace them with a set of fresh, useless addresses instead? One thing I do mind is people "editing" what I have written before reproducing it, without telling the difference between the original and their edition.
If Google won't remove the address masking "feature" (or at least make it optional), maybe I should request removal of all my postings from the Google archive, after I have obtained copies for submitting to some other archive, to have them reproduced without pointless mutilation. I intentionally refrained from masking my own address when I wrote those articles, and I don't want Google to do it for me 10-20 years later. My e-mail address is part of my identity, similar to a residential address; removing or masking it is almost like removing my name from my copyright notice if I ever wrote one.
Are there others who feel like I do, and would like to participate in a joint action, to let Google know what we think of their "improvements"?
For a start, taking something that was better than you really had a reasonable expectation of, then degrading it at a later date is not really "evil". Its a shame, and dissappointing, but its hardly "evil".
I personally know of several times a Usenet search on Google, limited by dat has been used to ward off / challenge bogus patents. It's a pretty good way to dig up prior art.
So, what Google has done is take away Green Lantern's ring. Green Lantern is still good, he just can't fight evil. So, what does that make Google? There are still other superheros.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You too can create a niche site devoted to your favrorite usent newsgroups.
1) make a list of your favorite newsgroups
2) get some discussion board software such as phpbb.org or vbulletin.com (they both have usenet import hacks available)
3) get an $8/month subscription to a usenet server site like giganews
4) upload the newsgroups onto your server
5) allow users to register, post, and search
It's what we've done at http://lampforums.org, which we started yesterday--we're still importing newsgroup messages.
If we're missing anything, please let us know!
This is somehwat of an experiment, so criticism always rocks.
A few lines of perl later, you have your own copy, a few months of bandwidth later.
It violates their ToS. Even if you don't care about that, they have mechanisms in place to prevent leeching - you get banned after a while.
Here's what I sent to Google. I had to resubmit their form several times as their Python script kept giving me 0-length responses. I wonder if their comment system is under some load? *smirk*
~~~
I have several complaints about the new groups interface. I had checked it out some time before but immediately gave up on it. I assumed that it would become at least as usable as the current groups interface. Feel free to verify this; my accounts are vsync@quadium.net and vsync128@gmail.com. I just saw the Slashdot article about it and checked it out again.
1. I tried the "original message" feature and noticed that it seems to be missing a lot of the headers. I don't know if this is a new problem but it is very distressing.
2. There is no date search. I recently was doing some research, attempting to find a particular Usenet commentary on the movie. The only way I was able to find what I wanted was by selecting a date range close to the release date of the movie. But hey, if you think that's less processor intensive than me doing a search of all posts ever, then looking through each page of results, more power to you. I won't waste my time personally, of course; I'll write a script to search the results of your search.
3. I like the ability to star topics. This is useful and reminds me of what Gnus can do. However why can't I star an old topic? The usefulness of starring, or "ticking" as it was called when it was invented the first time, is that you can later go back and see messages old enough to have fallen off the front page. Particularly if I had to hunt through the archives. What, you want me to scribble down Message-IDs on a Post-It? That is if you don't start masking Message-IDs too, or making a message lookup impossible.
4. You claim you plan to "[not] be evil". However now you hide the group hierarchy under "Browse all of Usenet", requiring an extra click for me. What is much worse is that you provide a "friendly" view of the group categories. It seems that you are trying to be like AOL and encourage non-technical users to think Usenet is the place for them, with their top-quoting and their spam and their poor spelling and their failure to understand threading. No good can come of this. I encourage you to Google for "the September that never ended".
5. I have my browser's monospace font set to "Andale Mono", an excellent font that is very easy to read. However your interface hard-codes the "Courier New" font for proper viewing of messages, and some inane sans-serif _thing_ for the default view of messages. This is highly improper. Most browsers use "Courier New" for monospace by default, meaning that the only reason I would ever change my preference is if I specifically want something other than Courier New. Why do you feel a need to trample on my UI preferences? And why isn't there an option to toggle, on a per-account basis, the sans-serif font used for body text in violation of all typographical guidelines and the glaringly white background?
6. This email address munging nonsense is a bad idea. Any spammers will simply get a real Usenet connection. And it's horrible to read a technical newsgroup, copy a diff from the message, and attempt to patch software with it, only to find out that your parsing software has decided that a particular string of characters containing "@" was an email address and helpfully "masked" (try the word "munged", which is more accurate, as it implies the annoying and irrevocable loss of useful information).
7. Why when I click on a particular message is the interface to do anything else on Google Groups hidden away in a tiny section of the upper left of the navigation frame? One of the nice things about Google is that there is seemingly a search box on every page. Way to discourage tangential research.
8. Why is your word wrap algorithm broken, and why are you even word wrapping? Usenet is fixed width, period. Sorry. If you must wrap and give people a broken view of the wo
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Back when Deja was doing badly people started projects to collect Usenet data. When Google Groups went online, they were abandoned after a while. Might be a good idea to revive the idea, even if Google Groups does not screw up. Just to have an alternative. Everybody stores a couple of groups, one mbox file per month. A big distributed data collection which can be used as the basis for another Usenet search engine.
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=s lashdot&q2=google&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&lan gue=us
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request
Please take a moment to give them feedback.
Note: deep linking still works and there is a sort by date, but as of now, no date range filter.
At least temporarily. The default is now the old groups, with a link to a preview of the beta version.
Deep linking to posts is still possible, just a bit trickier. Go to more options->show original, then view parsed.
If you really want to mess with the evil bastards, just create an interface for creation of new Usenet groups, similar to the way the evil systems let you create groups, but then have it go into Usenet as the repository rather than into a privately held Library of Alexandra.
Seastead this.
They don't care if this will break all of a user's archived links.
They didn't care when they took over DejaNews:
they easily could have done it in a way which would have preserved the usability of old Deja links, and chose not to, despite voluminous complaints.
So there's no reason to believe that they'll care about it this time.
Spelling: Google wrote its own spell checker, and maintains that nobody know as many spelling errors as it does.
That's only because it indexes slashdot.org.
Remove that from the Google index, and I bet you Slashdot wins over the rest of the net.
Google has to pay the bills too. Their approach to advertising has been pretty damn palatable compared to many alternatives out there. You and I don't have the power to force them to include a !shopping flag, but what would happen if we could? There would be no ad revenue for Google because nobody would ever look at an ad. That would mean either they go out of business, or it would mean more draconian feature reductions or other wierdness to try to compensate for the loss of revenue.
The ads along the right side aren't annoying. There are things to worry about (like no more date range searching) but the ads aren't it.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The first newsgroup I ever participated in (alt.games.video.tiger.game-com) appears not to have a complete archive, only about 539 threads going back to mid-1999. I know that the group existed from 1998 on, and a couple of my friends on the group regularly posted through DejaNews. Did Deja (or does Google) have a policy of deleting old threads from less popular groups? Did the Deja db get damaged in transit? What's goin' on here?
I submitted this is as an "Ask Slashdot" story. It was rejected of course. So, I will repeat it here where it will forever live in obscurity:
Don't just bitch on
Contact Google and tell them (politely!) what you think about the changes.
Say that you are unhappy about their decision.
Mention that you were a heavy user of Google Groups and often clicked on the advertisements.
Tell them that because of the removed features you went back to a traditional usenet client and no longer see any of their ads.
Phone them: (650) 623-4000
Email the Google Groups and Press teams.
Email Larry and Sergey at Stanford.
Try to contact the executives.
Post to their usenet group.
And most importantly, do not clisk on any Google ad until they reconsider.
someone who hasn't been using Usenet for 20 years design the "new" interface.
Google-- get a clue-- if it ain't broke, don't fix it...
> Prior art? Am I re-inventing the wheel? Am I crazy?
Not at all! Our lawyers will send you a check for $5 after they patent your idea.
If your project resembles the original Deja news (not the remake, but the OLD version) -- that was so much easier to use than anything since, that it was my Usenet interface of choice for reading, posting, and research, and it worked fine in ANY browser, with acceptable performance even on very slow connections.
:(
And as you say it's been all downhill ever since.
I don't have any archives to contribute, but I sure do look forward to your project's completion!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Works just fine with the old one.
Update: Seems to be funky case sensitive now. If I type the author name in mixed caps like actually exists in the messages, I *don't* find them. If I type the author name in all lower case, they are found.
Holy counter-intuitive, Batman. Oh, and the interface sucks. But at least I can pick show tree and get something close to what I want.
Google is partially funded by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. Kleiner Perkins partner Floyd Kvamme, a republican Silicon Valley legend, is the technological advisor of president Bush. His son, Mark Kvamme, works for Sequoia Capital and has personal contacts to Rumsfeld.
You can validate these facts by searching google for "google is fundend" and '"Kleiner Perkins" nsa'.
Therefore Google has (proven) strong ties to the NSA and how valuable the information collected by google is to secret services et. al. is left as an exercise to the reader. (Also consider the power connected to not only knowing who searches for what when where but also the power of beeing able to search through the e-mails of millions of people (which are coincidently stored forever - which is called a feature))
Now, call me paranoid, but if I were an intelligence agency, I would do EVERYTHING for getting my hands on that kind of power. On the other hand, if I was a company, I surely could not afford to rebell against my governments intelligence agencies as it would be pointless (because they would infiltrate my organisation anyhow) or even dangerous. Therefore I, if I were google, would cooperate with the TLAs in order to at least make more profit and have more powerful friends within governmental authorities.
AND NOW TELL ME, HOW GOOGLE COULD NOT BE EVIL?!?!
Sadly, I don't see a way for google not to be evil.
Please argue against this, if you can. Or feel free to feel scared as I feel. Thank you.
Google Groups is by far the most important resource I have for my career. I would not be able to solve problems without it. I've figured out problems that a 150K/year dba couldn't figure out by searching it effectively.
.NET/whatever and a multitude of ways to repurpose the data and provide completely open access to it, and they will start kicking some serious ass. I bet MS doesn't have stats on USENET searching but I bet it rivals web searching with any technologist demographic. You had better fix this Google or your a$$ is gra$$.
When I saw what they were doing with the new groups I was horrified. It's perhaps my worst nightmare that once they controlled a scarce resource such as the historical archive, that they would botch it and *start* to turn it into a proprietary offering slowly but surely.
It wasn't just the interface. The searching algorithm seemed to suck so royally I couldn't even begin to figure out what was going on. It was so bad it wasn't even funny. Not only that but it seemed to want to force you to register to have it remember things like the language you want the results returned in.
This is why any company running a database like this should be forced to provide access to the whole database as Web api's. Then if they see someone else create a new interface that utilizes the information differently, they will be incentivised to change their own service. There is NO WAY TO GET COMPETITION with a service like this given the size of the archive.
I really hope MS steps in. I hate to say it but they are brilliant at waiting for mistakes to be made and listening to customers when others weren't, stepping in like a knight in shining armor. I would bet my left testicle they have a rather large archive of USENET stored internally anyway. Maybe not back to the beginning, but old enough to be useful for most people. This would be an opportune time to generate goodwill with the geeks that love and rely on this service like crazy, and use it to showcase some of their new searching algorithms. Provide web services access with
They have just desecrated the corpse of deja news. This seriously pisses me off. I mean I expect a lot more out of google: The interface sucks ass! Arrr I be pist mateys!!
"Mind over matter: If you don't mind, then it doesn't matter"
The "new" NewsGroups are simply no good.
Simply go to groups.google.com.
So lets say I'm unfamiliar with groups and usenet, but have been having problems with spam in my inbox. So I go to beta groups and lookup Spam. Results: 146 groups. Of these:
- Most results on the first pages of results are for created groups (not usenet groups).
- if they are about spam, they have 1 or 2 members, rarely more (two with 40+ members).
- most created groups aren't about spam, they just have statements like 'Spam isn't tolerated here'
- By the time you get to Usenet groups, you're dealing with odd little alt.spam.* groups and other very low volume Usenet groups
- None of the results are for actual Usnet spam groups like NANAE or NANAS
If instead you're in Old Groups, a search on spam gets you NANAE and NANAS at the very top. If you sort by date NANAE still is at the top.So which search gives better results- BetaGroups with plenty of 2 member spam forums, or OldGroups that gets you to high-volume, deep-history groups where searches alone should result in some answers to questions about spam? I'd say that the Beta-Groups search for "Spam" is essentially useless. Old Groups gets you real discussions (True, lots of noise in that signal, and badly phrased questions from a newbie can get flamed, but the potential search and find actual info about spam exist in this hypothetical Old Groups search, especially if you get to FAQs).
this doesnt really relate to this story but i just wanted to add google hasnt been good for a couple years.. their db is full of junk and their search algorithm isnt like it used to be
i used to always find what i want, for the past 2 years i rarely find what i want
also i used to hear a song on the radio, type some of the lyrics and google and almost always find the song name.. now i get random blog sites and spam sites that have maybe 1 or 2 words out of the 10 i searched (and whats with that 10 word limit? argh!)
Quick summary:
Google is making Google Groups stupid and calling it an improvement.
I like gmail, but I really don't like this interface for google groups. Maybe I'll get used to it over time, but all I see now is a lot of clutter.
In Soviet Russia, Usenet Search Revises YOU!
I think I should get to work on Refrozen Groups (usenet.refrozen.com anyone?)
:-)
Seriously, if anyone wants to work on it with me, I have/can get the resources to mirror a large portion of the Usenet I think, s'long as our hits increase rapidly. Contact me @ sdfgdfg@refrozen.com
Oh my gad I just shat my pants. Teh spooky govmint is scaring me.
The real problem Google has to address if they want to restore value to the newsgroups is improvement of the SNR. The amount of garbage posted worldwide has been growing exponentially, but even faster since perpetual September arrived. Even the more technical areas are neck deep in tripe, but most of it is just like Hyde Park Speaker's Corner of the world and/or very cheap advertising.
Abuse of anonymity is one of the largest problems. There are proactive solutions (basically various forms of moderation--shades of /.) if you like that approach. However Google might have the capabilities to do it right, with analytical reaction to take revenge on the trolls. How about deep header analysis combined with personal usage patterns to track the trolls across all of their identities? Then they could offer a killfile feature that would really kill that troll dead!
Also, I'd want a tainting option. I don't even want to see the posts of the people who are suckered into feeding the trolls.
Come to think of it, they should go all the way and evaluate the perspicuity of the posters and use colors to indicate which posters actually know what the devil they are writing about!
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
More like completely face down, ass up
Writers imply. Readers infer.
What are your plans for tomorrow?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
You wrote it, great.
Why should a random third party make it possible, let alone easy, to access the shittings of yor keyboard?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
hey, you can always sniff the posts from groups.google :)
I did it once with a script because i wanted to be able to search by IP address (google dont want me to search by IP-suckers). It was small, only one group and a couple of months of archives. But it worked. I wasnt blocked or anything.
Just get yourselfe on a big fat pipe, write a script to fetch "raw posts" and go for it.
Go grab those torrents.
example .
I searched for "previously aware of" in alt.fan.douglas-adams between 1 May 1981 and 2 Dec 1993.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
USENET should be free again, not free as in beer, but free as in Freedom.
Try Nuggets, the first SMS search engine.
By introducing distribution, you introduce slowness, and slow speed is the last thing people want from a search engine or archive.
From a societal standpoint OTOH, anything that ends domination of a single entity over Usenet archiving is good.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
I am not sure if this recollection is based on the superiority of the UI design at Deja compared to groups.google, less noise in the search results, or a general tendency of people to make the past better than it really was... ;-)
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Baloney. The atomic unit (sector size) of every modern HD is 512 bytes. Thus all HD operations (read/write) occur on base-2 aligned sector boundaries.
And that's where it ends. Everything else is pretty much arbitrary. Okay, there's LBA as well, perhaps, but when you get to drive geometry there are no powers of 2.
It would have been nice if they'd have thought about this problem earlier. But I'm not going to knock Hard disk manufacturers for getting it right, even if it is just for marketting purposes. I'm more inclined to criticise RAM manufacturers for getting it wrong for marketting purposes all those years ago, and sticking with a flawed system.
I've sent them an email asking why the date-range search facilities were removed. Their reply:
Thank you for your feedback about Advanced Groups Search. As we develop the Google Groups Beta service, we'll continuously be working to improve our advanced search functions. This includes adding features such as date range and language restrictions.
So please people, don't jump conclusions.
Marketing corrected something that engineers got wrong
You may have had a valid point if they had done this consistently. They did not, and still do not.
Precision should be more important to engineers rather than considering 1024 bytes to be close enough to call it a kilobyte.
If this argument had been used when these terms first came into use, it would have been entirely valid. I probably would have supported the kibi-, mibi- etc naming system myself.
However, the "1024" meaning was what became standard, and anyone who knew enough about computers for it to matter *knew* this.
There was no confusion. It was precise.
No, by definition the kilo prefix means 1000. It's not a nitpick. It's vagueness on the part of computer manufacturers.
It wasn't vague. It was a precise (if inaccurate according to the accepted meaning) definition.
It became imprecise when marketing started using two different meanings for the same word.
> but the 2^10-based system makes a hell of
>a lot more sense in a computer-based context.
Only in RAM. And only because RAM is addressed using a binary system. Hard disks are not. [..] A base 2 system makes no sense for these.
The base 2 system makes sense for hard disks if it is the system used for RAM. You say that precision should be important. I consider using two different definitions of the same word (kilobyte etc) to be extremely poor in that respect.
Should we have to consider whether the data is being stored on disk or in memory when we quote its size in kilobytes?
As I said above, marketing corrected *nothing* that engineers "got wrong", because they freely use two different meanings of the word "kilobyte".
If they were really concerned about "precision", they'd either standardise their definitions, or use kilobytes or kibibytes where "appropriate". (If you consider base-2 to be "inappropriate" for HDDs; I don't, but that's more a matter of taste).
In fact, if they were really concerned about "precision", they wouldn't have abruptly started using a new defintion of "kilobyte", because the accepted meaning *was* precise (1024 bytes. Always.)
>If the computer manufacturers are so damn
>keen on the "correct" use of kilo, why the hell
>aren't they selling memory by the kibibyte
>, or quoting the capacity in "true" kilo-bytes?
I have no idea.
Seriously? We can make a pretty good guess. Was it a good and noble crusade to ensure the classically "correct" definition of "kilo-" was used that moved them into quoting HDD sizes in decimal megabytes?
Or was it a marketing ploy to make their HDDs appear bigger?
Well, assuming it was the latter (and, let's get real here, it *was* a marketing ploy), it's a fair bet that there are sound marketing reasons that they haven't started using decimal kilobytes for memory; ditto that for the lack of use of kibibyte etc.
Considering they always seem to be quoting MBs and GBs rather than Megabytes and GigaBytes, I doubt anyone would bat an eyelid if they quoted MiB and GiB instead.
I'm not convinced; plus, what would they say on TV?
"Dell Dimension with 256 mibibytes of memory" (run 'Intel Inside' animation)
"Mummy, what the fuck's a mibibyte?"
And I really don't know why they don't claim that machines come with 536MB rather than 512MB.
Marketing almost certainly has a good reason.
Which isn't the point anyway. The point is that there was a "standardised", precise definition of kilobyte that might (rightly) have annoyed the purists, but was nevertheless *precise*.
Marketing did not "correct" anything, because they freely use both the old and new definitions together. In short, what they did was worse than either sticking with the old definition or "etymologically correct, although not the standard that *everyone* knows" definition.
In short, they were marketing, and they did marketing's job of messing everything up to sell more crap, without correcting anything.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Imagine how easy it would be for 5 or 10 large usenet companies to come under fire and be shutdown. Down goes usenet.
That may be true for binaries, but "regular" text groups are distributed on way more servers.
Oh, I think it's entirely reality. My *preferred* browser is Netscape 3.04 (images and js off), and evidence of old Deja's got-rightness is that it worked perfectly with this old browser, even on my old Win3.1 box, and was swift even on 14.4 dialup.
Say, about your archive-to-be -- how will we be notified when it's ready to use? Also, a friend has 400-some megs of rec.games.computer.doom.* archived, if you need it -- let me know. (He'd need to pilfer someone else's DSL to upload it, tho. Stuck on dialup, just like me.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You can either visit our website at www.softmaker.de from time to time or subscribe to our newsletter there. I'll announce it there.
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
Ah. I looked at the site but didn't see the newsletter link... will look again. Thanks!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
www.softmaker.de/mailer_en.htm
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
They just replaced the classic version, it now redirects to the new version!
Blah, even the "Viewing titles only" option isn't as good, and you have to do another option for viewing as a tree. Too bad you have to do so many clicks to get it back, they really need a classic view.
Now why don't they go do something useful, like stopping the spammers/MLM scammers/etc and open proxy abusers from posting through their service.
Err thats just annoying, 2 gigs is barley worth it for reading newsgroups let alone downloading from them
I'll assume that by "barley" you meant "barely", not an ingredient of beer. Anyway, a good adult reader can read alphabetic text at 600 English words per minute, or 3000 to 4000 characters per minute, or about 512 UTF-8 bits per second. Even an old 1200 baud modem can keep up with human speed reading, which is why they were considered adequate for BBSing for so long. As for sustained throughput over a month, if Usenet takes twelve person-hours a day in the household, that's 2.7 MBytes per day or under 1 GB per month.
But whose family spends a total of 12 hours a day on Usenet?
several times I will be looking for a place to buy a rare or antique item because I will be getting all kinds of sites about the item but nobody selling it.
Google: online auction
Or add 'price' to your search.
Don't you mean Yattabytes?
I wouldn't have a problem with doctypes missing but stuff like
http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search
You can still search by date, and it looks just the same as it was a year ago.