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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)."
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.
We're the users. That's our right as users. If nobody questions the decision to remove features, then how does Google know what features we liked?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with constructive criticism, even with respect to a "free" service.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
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.
A little respect? Hah, unless they put these two features back within a week, they will cease to have any respect from me. I think I can safely cross Google off my "cool geeky things" list.
I'm not sure what motivated such changes, but usually you don't remove enhancesments to software unless they are causing major problems or if they somehow affect your financial bottom line. Somehow I think its related to the latter of the two because I don't see how the former would case problems.
You don't do something like collect nearly all the usenet postings ever made, make it searchable by date and then take it away. Basically people have lost the ability to do historical internet research using google groups. Sort by date is not even close to the same.
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
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.
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.
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