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.'"

Comments

Have you tried a stand-alone client?

[glitch23]

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.

History

[Idiomatick]

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...

Use the Source

[Pope Raymond Lama]

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)