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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)."
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!
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?
This is truly evil. Everyone make noise about this so we can get date range searches back!
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.
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!
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..
from "Don't be evil"?
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.
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
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
"Please fix things so I can give you money" is different than "please give us back our features that we don't pay your for, and you make no money off of".
Perhaps we have our reason right there. Google+ accounts anyone?
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Google groups.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
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.
An ideal opportunity for Yahoo, Teoma (or even MSN) to launch their own USENET archive. This shows how a Google monopoly will result in just as much stupidity as an MS one. If others can win over the early adopters, they have a good chance of getting extra market share for their other search functions too.
Unfortunately, I believe it to be inevitable that Google will become 'evil'. A single company that controls the search of all the information on the Internet.
Search the web, newsgroups, your desktop etc. It may be all free and good now, but how long before someone pays the right price to access/control what people see.
My experience is that Google search seems to be turning up more noise now than before. Two years ago I could with certainty do a search and get the page I wanted. Now it seems I must scroll through pages of commercial sites and the such to get to the meaty part of the Internet...those little novelty sites that people put up themselves.
Oh well, that's progress.
Yes, I remember seeing a link to the "new, improved" Google Groups Beta a few months ago when I was using the standard version. I tried it out because it was something new from Google, and I thought it would be outstanding. But I agree, the improvements really seem to be steps back, and I immediatly went back to using the old groups.google.com. I really hope all of the negative comments in the Google thread help them understand their users want these old futures, and even if they want to keep the new interface, it would be great if they could fix what they broke.
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.
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
The problem with that is google owns the dejanews archive.... while people will start a flame war about 'ownership' of public messages and how no one OWNS usenet.. I can't see any compelling argument that Yahoo or anyone else could make to force Google to share.
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.
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))"
Not to defend any evil company (won't publicly do that until I own one and it has made me a kazillionaire) but I'm not ready to count Google as a evil corporate entity yet. They are still in a relatively young market and competitive market. They can't afford to piss everyone off at this point - so I'm guessing that they THINK they are making improvements.
I remember when they originally took over the archive from deja. I was devestated - convinced they were going to totally screw it up. They didn't, or I got used to the screwed up version.
Also, regarding noise appearing in searches, this is a standard cycle that all search engines go through and Google's experiences are well documented. They are constantly changing their search engine to give the most relevant results. Gradually commercial sites that depend on high search results spend enough time and money optimizing their site. Google is constantly changing their tech to push that noise down, but it always gradually floats back to the top. It's in Google's best interest to show commercial sites in their paid ads, not in the valid search results.
Find coupons in Greeley
... 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.
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).
No "search by date" for Usenet == "useless".
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Your conversations in standard email are not private (unless you pgp them)
People along the transmission path, and sysadmins with access to the mail spool can snoop on them, yes. But (1) they are not intended to be shown to the whole world, while usenet posts are - by posting to usenet you are giving explicit permission for your post to be public, and (2) they are not visible to every single person in the world with a web browser.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'd be willing to join your concern by voting with my feet and not using the Google search engine any more.
The only question is, which alternative search tool do you recommend?
My other processor is big-endian.
Finally, it looks like the the slashdroids are waking up and rubbing the Google pixie dust from their eyes.
:(
Google has been heading down the "evil" path for quite some time now. It's surprising how effective the simple phrase "don't be evil" has been as an effective shield against honest scrutiny around here.
Er, well, not quite; Microsoft gets hammered much more for "embracing and extending" standards and then preventing other implementations from using those "extensions" thereby forcing everyone who wants to be compatible with Microsoft to use Microsoft products. Google not including the doctype , on the other hand, is fairly innocuous, its not like IE or Firefox have issues with it.
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
To be fair, with the volume of documentation appearing out there teaching you "How to optimise your web-site get googled to death", it's not surprising that the noise is getting worse. It's a regular arms-race, with search-engine development and web-design counter-development.
On the plus side though, dev-races like this do help to improve search-engine technology. Although this article doesn't fill me with hope...
Meta will eat itself
Depends on what they meant to say. If he meant "Give me results that are not as commercial as, say, a Yahoo store front" might yield results with a detailed review and a link to purchase.
In other words, maybe the man said what he meant.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
PageRank is primarily based on the number of links to your site. However, you can create a site that no one has every seen before and buy links for it. It will get a decent PageRank and could rank very well depending on the targeted keyword eventhough it is not popular.
;)
I really thought this would be obvious. Nice non-use of your brain