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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)."
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.
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. Mind you, those "features" allowed me to resurrect some semi-useful postings I had made:
Reading C Declarations: A Guide for the Mystified
The ANSI Standard: A Summary for the C Programmer
EricTry 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.
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
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.
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.
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
http://groups-beta.google.com/support/bin/request. py
/. was brought to bear upon this subject...
This is the feature request/bug reporting form.
They claim to read every mail generated by this link.
I just submitted a question about this.
I wonder what they'd do if the full power of the
/sig
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.
Implementation details of the Google File System can be found in this paper by Google engineers.
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.
Even more progress: No ability to click on username and see all their older posts. That was usefull, someone suddenly posting gibberish to sci.chem, after years of posting to alt.flame.[insert racial group here] was an obvious troll looking for attention.
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.
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.)
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).
I put this in my userContent.css file (the client-side stylesheet) in Mozilla:Any anchor that has a name attribute will disclose that attribute on the page. The file is in your ~/.mozilla//*/chrome/ folder, unless you use Windows where I don't know its location offhand. You may have to create it. (Your browser will need to be restarted for this change to take effect.)
It likely works for Firefox too.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I used this to bitch about the non-standard HTML coming out of their site, and an actual human responded a few days after an auto-responder did.
Of course, their HTML still doesn't validate...
- chrish
google needs a "I'm not shopping flag" you can put into the search string like !shopping or something. Maybe I will suggest that on that link up a few posts.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I imagine that -price -store would go a long way to what you want, in the meantime.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The very last paragraph of the zdnet article might make you slightly happier then:
Note the "yet"!flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Well, there might be a more practical reason than they simply don't care about standard HTML. It appears the main problem is they don't tell the doctype. That would take them an extra 118 bytes PER REQUEST to include the type. That means, according to the 1000 requests per second mentioned in the article, they are saving 115Kbps in transfer rates by not including the doctype. It doesn't seem like much, but it is the same thing that got airlines to stop serving food. And this is just the Doctype. I'm sure they cut bites out wherever they can.
As stated elsewhere, would Google respect your request if it was made from a different email address to the one in the original post? I've made *many* posts from addresses that no longer exist
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 can see the practical side of this, but this is effectively saying "we're too cheap to implement the standard properly, so we're going to play fast and loose with it to save some money". Microsoft gets hammered for this kind of stuff (rightly, IMHO), so why not Google?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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
They should have the option of not displaying anything found in Froogle when displaying regular Google results.
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.
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!)