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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.'"
Interesting. "lr" is the language dropdown.
<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2><tr><td class=label><label> Language:</label></td><td width=74%><select class=sef name=lr ><option value= selected>any language</option><option value=lang_ar >Arabic</option>....
I used to LOVE Experts Exchange back in 2000, but lost interest in them when they made it nearly impossible to make meaningful use of the site without paying REGARDLESS of how many expert points you'd racked up over the years, or how many "best answers" you'd earned. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend hours of my time building value for them only to be subjected to petty annoyances when I finally need to have one of my OWN questions answered. The fact is, I'd say a majority of the useful answers there are (or at least WERE) contributed by a fairly small core group of users... a group they totally alienated and drove away by their refusal to let that small group "earn its keep" and earn enough points to usefully use the site through barter alone so they could bring in the BULK of the users who just wanted to pay and get their questions answered.
I still get hits in Google to articles in journals where you have to be a subscriber to read the article (in other words, Google is somehow indexing content that I can't see without coughing up some money). These search links are also never cached. I've seen enough of it that I'm guessing that Google must be in on it.