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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)."
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.
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.
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.
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
It seems its still possible to sort by date. So instead of limiting your search to a date range, just sort by date then clicky-click the "o"s until you find the range you want.
Of course, it makes it difficult to sort by relevance *within* a date range.
I.O.U One Sig.
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.
There is no browsable hierarchy of "groups"
They have dumbed this down a bit, but if you are looking for a specific group it's not hard to find what you're looking for.
Search for 'latex', and there are links to the right to TeX specific news groups.
no real message threading
Click the "view as tree" link above the postings. This gives you the same type of two pain threading the old interface had.
I will miss the search by date stuff though.
-- john
We have seen this beta as groups2 for quite a while now. Keeping this separate was a good idea and it should have remained that way. I personally don't want Googles own version of Yahoo groups mixed up with usenet.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
http://groups-beta.google.com/groups?selm=33e2154e .5216 53%40news.clara.net
Although it looks slightly Disneyfied...
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.
.@.
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' );
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.
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.
Will people quit modding the parent up? +4?
He's wrong, and not informative at all.
They quietly dropped the Path: line from the headers in the view original format option a while ago. Why??? It's very important for detecting forged posts, and provides very interesting historical propagation information. (Very interesting to some people, at least.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
I just did a search for "sparc linux" and was able to search by date, and then sort by date.
I haven't the slightest idea where the original poster got their information.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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?
Alright people, you can stop overreacting. They just rearranged some things, that's all.
There's a link at the top of the thread to turn on the left-hand tree frame.
Deep-linking to a single post is still very much possible.
And I highly doubt that a search-by-date feature is going to go missing for long in a 20-year archive. This is, after all, a BETA.
As per usual, Slashdot editors didn't even think it worth their time to follow a single link to see if the submitter wasn't trolling.
Once you've entered groups-beta, the advanced search no longer includes search by date. The old google groups advanced search still includes search by date.