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How to Search Today's Usenet For Programming Information?
DeadlyBattleRobot writes "I've been using Usenet searches since about 1995 to get programming information, sample code, etc., mostly for those standard APIs that are never documented well enough in the official documentation. At first I used dejanews, and now Google Groups (Google bought dejanews). Over the last few years, I've noticed a steady decline in the quantity of search results on programming topics on Usenet from Google, increasing difficulty with their search UI and result pages, and today I find I'm completely unable to get a working Usenet search on their advanced group search page. I'm used to searching on 'microsoft.*' or 'comp.*,' sometimes supplemented with variations like '*microsoft*' or 'comp*.' As an example, try to find a post from the 1996-1998 time period on 'database' in either the comp.* or microsoft.* hierarchies, and if you can do it, please show your search expression. There should be thousands of results, but I'm getting the result 'Your search — database group:comp.* — did not match any documents.'"
Have you tried using a stand-alone news client and its own specific search functions? Something like Thunderbird's or any other news client may be of use to you.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Usenet had groups that didn't have *.sex.* or *.beastiality.* in it? Man, I missed a LOT during the 90's...
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. -
Use stackoverflow.com, you will get precise answers in a few minutes
Kibo seems to know how find stuff on usenet.
Usenet is more or less dead with respect to technical discussions. They have all moved to disparate Web forums, the most offensive of which put freely-given advice from volunteers behind a paywall.
There actually are a couple of good forums for Win32 advice, such as CodeProject, and Google is still the best way by far to search MSDN, by adding site:microsoft.com to your query.
But Google's handling of Usenet, including (but not limited to) their unauthorized alteration of message content by mangling email addresses, has not been healthy for the venue.
database group:microsoft*
Results 1 - 10 of about 97,400 from Jan 1, 1996 to Jan 1, 1998 for database group:microsoft*
Usenet used to be HUGE, but now it seems to be fading away. It's like all the hard-core admins who used to maintain everything are getting tired of it all.
GoogleGroups used to be good for searching stuff like this, but that too, seems to be suffering from "data rot".
Admittedly, nearly half the "content" itself could fall under the category of "rot" even when it was new, but that's for another thread...
[End Of Line]
There's a bug in the advanced search form. After you do the advanced search and it gives you the did not match any documents, just click on the "search" button on that second page. (alternately, removing the lr=selected parameter makes it work also)
hi, you must be noob to the internets. this usenet thing went the way of horse drawn buggies and panning for gold. I would suggest you use the web that is world wide (www). this will help you significantly. thank you sir.
Am I the only one who finds that the search function in Google Groups sucks abysmally? I mean, you've got 10 duplicate results for even thread returned all over the place which makes looking for results from threads you haven't read from yet impossible.
You just got troll'd!
I used to heavily use the newsgroups as well but for years there has been too much spam on the newsgroups to make them very useful.
Instead I rely on web based forum posts which are indexed by Google and others.
Using the daterange tools was successful in finding posts with the word "database" in them.
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=database+group%3Acomp.*&btnG=Search&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1996&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=1&as_maxy=1998&as_drrb=b&sitesearch=groups.google.com
994 results
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=database+group%3Amicrosoft.*&btnG=Search&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1996&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=1&as_maxy=1998&as_drrb=b&sitesearch=groups.google.com
993 results
I agree that something is off, but I can't put my finger on it.
---------------------
Ah, more info:
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=database+group:comp.*&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1996&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=1&as_maxy=1998&as_drrb=b&sitesearch=groups.google.com&num=100&filter=0&sa=N&start=800&scoring=d
yields 553 results, none from before March 1997. I should be getting at least 450 more results.
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=database+group:comp.*&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1996&as_maxd=1&as_maxm=1&as_maxy=1997&as_drrb=b&sitesearch=groups.google.com&num=100&scoring=d&sa=N&start=900
gives 606 results, now with 1996 results. Hmm.
Agreed, something's not right with the results. Maybe this entered in with the new "search all Internet forums" feature, I'm not sure.
- Stiletto
Google Group seems boring, not really Google's fault but whenever I browse a topic, I never find anything relevant. Maybe bad luck. Anyway, for code samples, why not using Google Code Search? You can limit your search to specific languages, which is very convenient.
My search results
Small values of work, of course. I specified the microsoft.public hierarchy but ended up with a variety of other groups.
Sorry, but I've never been a big fan of Deja News, or what Google has done in the area generally. I've maintained my own archives for as long as I can remember (both usenet and email), but don't keep anything that old. I think most usenet providers will provide at most a year's worth of postings for the text-only groups, so you're asking a lot.
Maybe check on Microsoft's site to see whether they retain any significant history for their own groups? If you do, be sure to use Google. Microsoft' search is even lamer than what you're up against. ;-)
His question isn't "how do I do it?", dumbass. It's "why doesn't it work?"
Google groups has to be poorly maintained. There is link on google group's front page labeled "Take the tour". It points to "http://groups.google.com/intl/en/googlegroups/tour3/index.html?lnk=hptt#" which is 404. A 404 link on a front page clearly indicates that google does not care about google groups.
Go browse alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica.*, after a few minutes (give or take) you'll either be "released" from your programming stress and free to write beautiful code, or you'll be ready for a cigarette and a nap :D
The question you ask is wrong...since people are no longer answering questions on usenet. The proper question is...where can I find answers to programming questions.
Answer:
www.stackoverflow.com
I completely agree that Google has been royally screwing up this search page. I also don't see how Google could foul up this search so badly. As you point out I just want to limit my search to microsoft.public.acccess* and it doesn't work. See http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/archive/2008/08/17/google-search-is-becoming-more-and-more-useless.aspx for my blog on this topic as well. And click on the Google complaints tag.
Unfortunately, that's the bottom line and it has been that way for a number of years. USEnet was a great resource in its time, but these days I'd say you're much better off doing a google search on the web which might point you towards one of the thousands of programming sites that may have that nugget of info you're after.
Cheers,
...but BSD is OK!
Nobody really reads much usenet anymore, and during the decline earlier in this decade, the problem was that the poster would post but the replies would come in private email. So yes, the question might get answered, but the answer never got shared.
The reason? Spam. Usenet posts became the #1 source of email addresses to spam because anybody could easily and cheaply hook up to a usenet feed and just gobble them up. So nobody posted anymore 'cause nobody wanted their address to end up on a spam list from hell.
Eventually with little proof online that anybody was reading the questions, people just stopped posting them.
Usenet was a wonderful thing when it was needed. Today, while the idea of a central yet open (re: infinitely cloned) repository of all topics of conversation may seem nice, it'll never happen again so long as spam is a problem.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Pros do NOT use forums. Forums are slow & inefficient (having to visit sites individually, regularly, unless they provide decent feeds). They're also centralised, which is bad in technical circles when you know stuff can go wrong, and that people can become dictators. Generally speaking, forums tends to be haunted by younger people who grew up thinking the web was the net, and started by people who care more about building a name for their site and advertising revenue than building a functioning discussion community. Also, the moderation on forums tends to either be limited, or heavy-handed.
The rest of us use mailing lists which feed directly into our mail clients (read: not webmail), and let us search/reply/archive at will. That works out very similar to usenet, is more practical now with decent mailing list software, and so it's an obvious transition. We also like IRC which allows real-time, moderated conversation, combined with online logs of those conversations.
INVALID WORKSFORME.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
expertsexchange.com?
Sorry good sir, not falling for it.
If you think about it, most google apps have a few really cool and flashy features (which is why I like to use them), but then tend to have lots of UI bugs. Also, it's pretty much impossible to actually report bugs to google. At best you'll find some google group on the product that no engineer ever looks at.
Aside from the one mentioned google groops had lots of basic bugs. Until recently reading comp.lang.c++.moderated on google groups caused all sorts of problems because they weren't properly handling the escape of the ++ characters in the url (every time I clicked on a link I'd have to edit the url manually to get it to work). It took them years to find out about that and fix it. Although it was a daily annoyance to me, I had no way to get it into any kind of bug tracking system.
Even worse I've *never* been able to use google gears or google docs without major bugs and error messages, no matter what browser I used (including chrome).
Gmail, google reader, and basic search are probably the only google web apps I've seen that don't have lots of bugs. I actually have a higher opinion of their desktop apps.
Reader, which is awesome and you should check out btw, used to be very bug ridden, but it's massively improved over the last year and a half.
Search actually is kind of problematic in that the basic search works fine, but lots of the extensions are broken. Last time I tried subscribed links was broken. As in, it didn't work *at all* and there was no workaround.
I think honestly that while they obviously have high quality engineers, they just have sucky QA. I think that they focus too much on unit tests, and have forgotten that a lot of basic bugs can only be detected by someone hammering on the interface of the production system and logging bugs.
Also, I think they've basically destroyed their ability to have beta software, by making all of their software beta. Now, user have no way of distinguishing what is truly production ready software from stuff that clearly isn't, except by trying it and getting burned.
And why is it that every time I go to groups front page, I get redirected to a fancy shmancy welcome page which tries to force me to login with my google account to just read groups? I don't want to post, I just want to read.
It isn't that usenet has changed its the people. Back in the early 90s and before pretty much only nerds were online. So there were many insightful posts on codeing and all kinds of nerd related stuff. Signal to noise ratio was good. Now insightful nerds make up about 5% of the online population and have a ratio about equaling the real world. The real world voted in bush twice and believes it was created by an invisible man in the sky. Really back when we had control of the internet instead of making it usable and fast we should have been designing a system to keep the internet to ourselves, damn nerd tendancy to improve things. Its depressing to me that when we make a feasible ai it'll be owned by some rich oil selling hick be controlled by marketing folks and dissed worldwide for nerds playing god creating abominations. You know what I hope the mafiaa and special interests fucking breaks the internet. That way only nerds could use it properly ignoring how slow it may become. .... Man I really went off on an unrelated rant...
I'm used to searching on 'microsoft.*' or 'comp.*,' sometimes supplemented with variations like '*microsoft*' or 'comp*.' As an example, try to find a post from the 1996-1998 time period on 'database' in either the comp.* or microsoft.* hierarchies, and if you can do it, please show your search expression.
Here, try this alternate syntax and you may have more luck:
I'm used to searching on 'm$.*' or 'comp.*,' sometimes supplemented with variations like '*m$*' or 'comp*.' As an example, try to find a post from the 1996-1998 time period on 'database' in either the comp.* or m$.* hierarchies, and if you can do it, please show your search expression.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
>The question you ask is wrong...
>since people are no longer answering questions
>on usenet.
Some communities use usenet almost exclusively (the c++ community is basically built around comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.lang.std.c++). Furthermore, a lot of programming mailing lists are mirrored to usenet.
The problem the poster had was that google's search for usenet sucks, which I have to agree. In general, google groups has deteriorated since they started adding non-usenet groups to the service.
>Answer:
>www.stackoverflow.com [stackoverflow.com]
Stackoverflow is great, but it has nothing to do with usenet or newsgroups.
Usenet is a place for communities of people to have discussions. Basically, it is a unified distributed bulletin board system, with boards for discussions of all topics *ever*. It is also a convenient place to mirror mailing lists, so that they can be browsed in a unified manner without having to subscribe to a million different mailing lists, or go to lots of different websites.
See: gmane.org
Stackoverflow is a question answer service.... basically the same as yahoo answers except that it is focussed on answers to programming questions. Basically, it is a FAQ generation system.
No, what killed USENET for most technical subjects is a social one: there was no social cost for posting, thus every uneducated random wanderer posted on it. Not just spam, but also posts from real persons who only had a vague notions of what whatever subject the group was about. Literally, but putting all discussion in one heirarchy was one of its biggest faults.
So where is such discussion now? Some of it, as had been said already, is in specialized web sites; most of those are moderated. But for many subjects, it has moved to old-fashion email lists. One has to be willing to risk filling your inbox with unwanted messages to even see the list much less post to it. So, few people do. Only the folks truly dedicated to that subject take that risk...and that is good. Now the discussion is between committed insiders and the signal-to-noise ratio improved greatly.
So, if you are willing to commit to your subject, find the narrow mailing list that covers it and subscribe. (Disclaimer: not all subjects have these hard-core lists, do a Google search first.)
Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek software) has recently launched a new web site for programming questions, http://stackoverflow.com./ It has lots of good answers to questions, and is well designed to be very easy to search and find results.
...but since no one else has: I find all the code examples I need with a search engine. I gave up on Usenet many years ago. You should do the same. You might be surprised at the number of relevant items you get returned on a Google search.
What regex library do you use which precludes a match for microsoft.* also being a match for *.beastiality.* ?
I don't see what the problem is. It works fine.
1) Go to http://www.google.com
2) Click the More menu at the top of the page
3) Select Groups
4) Enter your search term: database group:comp.*
5) Get back about 3,000 responses
Google killed Usenet
Agreed, but for the record: The link has a typoo, try to make the last part ?lnk=http# instead of ?lnk=hptt#. Of course that does not change the point, a faulty link on the front page is discouraging.
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
Anyone else having Google Calendar simply getting stuck in a cycle before it loads, and never getting anywhere beyond that except giving you a flickering tab title? Firefox 3/Linux.
Just come out and admit it, you want to find the thread that shall not be named from a.s.r. If you just asked directly, I would tell you that Google has it archived at vgiJgfe9$fu3+++carrier lost+++
Get a well-maintained news server and there'll hardly be any spam. Unfortunately, such a thing is hard to find, there isn't really any money in text newsgroups, and regular ISPs continue to give up on Usenet altogether and recommend Google Groups (which is a cruel joke). Individual seems to be one of the remaining good servers, for EUR 10 per year, but it has a dedicated team behind it. For technical things like programming languages or databases, Usenet groups in comp.* are still great.
It's very easy to tell your google you want good ol' Expert Sexchange to fuck off:
-inurl:experts-exchange.com
Add that to your search query. Most of the time I like having their results come up, but every now and then, the results are so polluted that I need them gone. Rule of thumb is that if an Expert Sexchange result comes up, your problem is either *that* stupid, obvious, or uncommon.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Seriously!
Why botter with programing APIs whose owners don't wnat your programing for then at all?
Start porgraming only for APIs for which you have the public source code available,, in plain sight, nad not hidden in years-old usenet posts. If the docuemtnation is not enough, you can always check the source code, and help improve the documentation yourself.
I see nosense in adding value (i.e. contributing working code) to a system whose owner does not want me to add value to to start with.
(btw, if you didná get a clue, that almost excludes *microsoft* - though I e heard they e published the API's on some of their latest hyped-up stuff, so that their drones at Novell can create a multi-platform implementation for them)
-><- no
You can also use gmane for searching. It also indexes mailing lists and gives rss feeds. http://www.gmane.org
Searched gmane.gmane.comp.* for database
Around 1,476,851 matching articles. Results 1-10.
61,729,119 articles searched in 7.346229 seconds.
Hey, since we're going all socialist and everything, how about just letting the Library of Congress maintain a complete archive of everything from Usenet as well as the Web? It's not like search technology to actually find stuff and return a list is so advanced that a government bureaucracy can't do it better than Google has(n't) been doing it.
Seastead this.
Discussion forums, much like primetime television in the US, has become fragmented over the last decade. Usenet groups such as comp.lang.java.programmer and comp.lang.c++ used to be the definitive places to get help and information. Now, everyone's off to their separate forums, and it's harder to find a centralised place to get quality info.
The same thing happened to network television. Except for the Super Bowl or series finales, viewership on the major networks has declined since there are so many cable networks.
In both cases it comes down to capitalism. Everyone wants to open up that great new website or that hot new cable network to make money. Websites for programming are incredibly splintered into individuals' blogs and small communities. Heck, even 7chan has a section on programming.
Who's to blame? It's clearly Google. AdSense is making everyone money-hungry and eager to open up new websites to draw users to get clicks and thus ad money for the website owner. With quality content all fragmented, it's no wonder Usenet information has declined. F U Google.
But wait, i'm a comcast user... what is this 'usenet' you speak of?
All kidding aside, usenet isn't what it used to be, i don't know if it really is worth looking for something of value out there. Sad to say it, but its pretty much true.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It isn't Usenet - rather mailing lists. But there's quite a bit of crossover. http://markmail.org/
I've noticed a major fall off in search results over the last year or so, when searching usenet google groups that have tons of useful info in them. GG search just seems to fail...either very few or no results for many completely relevent searches.
I've tried writing about this to google in the help groups they provide, but they've never responded. That's been a major eye opener for me. I had the same experience with another google tool issue...nothing there, no support at all. Google seems to be pretty oblivious to input from users. What that means is they seem to have taken their eye off the ball...can some startup please step up to the plate?
I really hope that someone does post a link to some site that offers useful usenet archive searches. There are plenty of discussions of programming topics in usenet which are not reproduced on www.
Whilst I tend to use a normal Google search for queries on any modern tools/technologies, If I need to find out about something less than bleeding edge then the massive archive that is Usenet is a godsend. Or at least was a godsend until Google messed it up. The last few times I've used Google groups it was terrible - unrelated trash an almost impossible to get anything back from Usenet groups no matter what cunning tricks I tried. There's an awful lot of knowledge being lost there people :-(
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
He said that the web doesn't exist, not the Internet.
It wasn't good logic though, for either of them. Both the web and the Internet are only loosely interconnected, the web through HTML links and the Internet through linking routers and other devices.
They can both be seen as a mass of separated islands (ie. websites and LANs, respectively), but in both cases the virtual system that the links create ensures that the web and Internet do actually exist in practice, as long as the links work when required. And they do.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,000 for database group:comp.*
I'm surprised to see posts about how USENET is defunct. Yet most USENET tech groups remain viable to date. USENET remains the best source of technical support bar none.
I do wish Google would add a third option, "Non-Google groups only", to searches. The groups maintained by Google are populated mostly by SPAM. Google seems to have no interest whatsoever in controlling that SPAM.
"The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated". - Mark Twain
Google has pretty completely fucked up in their handling of usenet archives. Some examples:
We really need some competition for Google in this area. There's some very valuable stuff in the usenet archives, and that needs to be in competent hands.
Searching on "database group:comp.*,microsoft.*" (actually, I put "database" into the "find web pages that have all these words" box and "comp.*,microsoft.*" into the "Group" selection box. Then I set the date range to "jan 1, 1996 to dec 31, 1998"), found "about 994 for database group:comp.*,microsoft.*". Now, I agree that seems way too low, but I don't know that I have another means of checking.
I do not EVER again want to see CiteSeer, ExpertsExchange,
etc.. Also, many "Review" sites that have no reviews.
ie "no reviews, add your own now".
There is GiveMeBackMyGoogle, but this is limited to
20 "-"'s in the google query.
So, I want a widget that fetches the results from google.
Then iterates the returned hits, checking for URL's from
useless sites. The remaining page is than passed to the
browser.
Thanks in advance, and sorry for the OffTopic,
but I think others would be interested in this!
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
Maybe the parents post got crawled?
Google groups started going downhill after they added a Yahoo! groups clone.
What regex library do you use which precludes a match for microsoft.* also being a match for *.beastiality.* ?
Microsoft's, of course.
and aclocal.m4 in the event that you have upgraded an libtool trying to run against a previously setup and working source tree build.
This is advice to myself and may or may not work but is the result of a few days fairly persistent searching.
If there was a decent way to ask the question - and I did in a couple of relevant places - to people who know that would be good.
Identifying libtool as the problem in the first place was hard as well.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
My favorite part was when he called anwyn an invalid.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Can people who insist on having mailing lists that are pinged for every damn check-in *please* add them to some robots.txt so they dont show up in my search results? Pretty please?
Or, somebody please give me a simple way to filter them out in google?
Sure it sounds great, what could be better then being an engineer in a company full of engineers with no management? Except odds are very good your special project will be released and never, ever maintained.
I knew for a fact they'd never maintain Chrome. They'd toss out a beta and then walk away from it. Have they updated it at all?
They'll do the same thing with Android. They'll release the first version and then walk away.
They buy dejanews, a wonderful resource, and now most of the results are spam come from spammers who abuse their own "Google Groups" system!
Even friggen Analytics has had Event Tracking in private beta for over a *year*. Their documentation never mentions the fact it is beta, but if you implment Event Tracking, you'll never see a change in your reports... why? Unreleased Beta.
Google, if it expects to become a major player in the software industry, needs to grow up. It has no clue how to release quality software on time. It has no clue how to maintain said software.
They need to decide if they are an advertising company or a software company. If they want to be both... good luck with that.
I have very little faith in Google at this point. They seriously need to grow up if they want to survive in the long run. Right now, they are a bunch of kids trying to pretend they are adults.
Google Groups has been completely nondeterministic for a few years by now. I wonder why they've been doing interface changes lately when it's clear that the core search engine doesn't work.
It often doesn't find things that are obviously there. Sorting by relevance or date often makes a difference; Sometimes if you get no results if you sort by relevance, you may get more if you change to sort by date.
Sometimes it makes a difference whether you use groups.google.com or say groups.google.se. The latter used to yield more results for me but now they are probably both equally broken.
Sometimes if makes a difference whether you restrict your search to a particular group or not, even if you are only looking for things that were posted in that particular group.
Searching by "author:" sometimes works but usually doesn't.
Advanced search is probably much worse than even ordinary search.
I find the unstructured nature of the web very inconvenient to search the USENET (read Google Groups). If you really want a disciplined approach towards accessing the USENET, make use of a dedicated client and a free newsgroups server...especially since these servers (unlike Google's) do not archive very old posts. I use Windows Live Mail Desktop and an Italian newsgroups server and they work perfectly in tandem. If your searches are Microsoft-specific, you might connect directly to their own USENET server (which only hosts Microsoft related topics). Certain Microsoft forums (from MSDN), however, do not have a USENET reflection. Though I'm forced to access the web to post a query in such a case, I can use an RSS reader (like FeedDemon) to access their rss feeds.
I have found also a steady decline in newsgroups over the years, to the point where they are unusable because of narrow minded jerks with an axe to grind, or an agenda to push.
Try finding any technical info on say the Internet Explorer "Operation Terminated" bug, and the responses are filled with assholes saying "Use Firefox". Whether that is good advice or not is not the issue, but it's downright annoying when all these "wanna-be-experts" pollute supposed technical forums with bullshit just to satisfy their egos / post counts / reputations, even though they have nothing constructive to add to the discussion.
To be honest, I lean towards the established forums now, such as http://perlmonks.org/ for Perl related stuff etc ... it's the only way you'll get anything remotely pertinent, and not "politically" tainted.
I use an honest to goodness, bona-fide, actual newsreader program. It works well, and can search through posts in specific groups as quickly as itunes works with music.
(I use unison, a mac app, but I know there are considerably more options for windows)
Seems to work for me.
The query asks for articles containing the word 'database' that appeared in comp.* between 1981 and 1999.
Only got about a thousand hits though (most from comp.database.* groups), I have to admit I had expected more.
Well, while GP wasn't exactly friendy, maybe it _should_ have been "How do I do it?" The search works just fine here.
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?as_q=database&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&scoring=&lr=&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1996&as_maxd=31&as_maxm=12&as_maxy=1998&as_ugroup=comp.*&as_usubject=&as_uauthors=&safe=off
Connection closed by foreign host.
The reason? Spam. Usenet posts became the #1 source of email addresses to spam because anybody could easily and cheaply hook up to a usenet feed and just gobble them up.
Which boils down to the question in the topic. Ever since the start of NNTP it was perfectly possible to use a fake e-mail address, just to prevent problems like you just stated, which most people also do. Or they simply clue you in on their real address in the message itself
The problem isn't the spam you get due to collected e-mail addresses, not for those with some clue anyway. The real problem is the spam which is dumped in the groups themselves. That is a major issue which should (or should not) be filtered out by providers.
the link has a typoo
typoo for the win!!1!
It doesn't (yet) cover general IT questions, but for programming questions, StackOverflow is meant to be a better, and free, alternative to Experts Exchange.
Lots of technical stuff are via mailing lists today. Use http://markmail.org/ to search those.
(Note: this is an AJAX site where the back/forward browser buttons work perfectly - quite impressive.)
URL for direct searching of a specific group/list (in this case a search for "float" on "css-discuss"):
http://css-discuss.markmail.org/search/?q=float
Google's results are so shortened as to be indecipherable from being censored? Well, if it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck...
Whether through malice or incompetence, they have just added heavy weight to the argument for more, and more open, usenet browsers and repositories.
And this is the third (for database group:microsoft.public.access):
Re: starting up database
microsoft.public.sqlserver.server
It was not crossposted to microsoft.public.access.
If you keep going, you'll see results from frontpage, informix and sybase groups.
The scientology one I posted was from "searchterm group:microsoft.public.access". I just literally searched what you posted.
Here's another for you:
erase group:microsoft.public.access
Not a single m.p.a hit on the first page. Plenty of other crap, though.
By an odd coincidence, 994 is the number of matches I get for my own name (as it's always appeared in my .sig). The earliest match is from 1999. If I search on an email address I used earlier, I get matches going back to 1991 -- with my name appearing just as it does in the other posts. Trying various other addresses, I can get back as far as 1990, but I'm pretty sure I was posting back in the mid-'80's.
Yeah, broken.
Interestingly, today I find
"about 914" hits using "database group:comp.*,microsoft.*"
"about 768" hits using "database group:microsoft.*,comp.*"
"about 959" hits using "database group:microsoft.*"
and, even odder than those:
"about 901" hits using "database" (with no group restriction at all)
"about 3750" hits using "database" (with no group restriction, and a date range of "Jan 1, 1981 through Dec 31, 2008")
Somebody ought to tell them - unless some of the Googlies read Slashdot -- then they already know, don't they? Problem solved.
Many of your points are valid, but there is a simple workaround for #1:
I was searching for a particular post by message ID[...]Google still could not find it
Go to alt.test and start a new thread.
Make the first line of your post
X-No-Archive: yes
In the body of the post, include the Message ID in the form
news:a4b525da-083c-44cf-9324-7e143cae51a9@w39g2000prb.googlegroups.com
Post the message.
Give the database a moment to update the group's main page then click your new thread.
The Message ID of that post will now be clickable and (assuming that Google archives the group in which that post appears) you can read it.
Well over a year ago they added this capability, shortly after I reported it via their (now defunct, best I can tell) Report a Bug page.
As has been said in the comments to this article, Google's QA (especially Google Groups') sucks more each day.
gewg_
I think the truth behind google groups is that the google-friends mailing list, originally hosted on egroups [which was later bought by yahoo, and became yahoo groups], was the original impetus for creating google groups. Later they bought deja to save it from going bankrupt. Also note that their archive was never really completed like they promised. Just look at the alt.tv.simpsons summary. The number of posts from april 1995 drop way off right when the shows popularity was taking off.