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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.'"
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. -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
INVALID WORKSFORME.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
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.
>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.
My webmail lets me search/reply/archive at will...
Anyway, it seems naive to completely rule out forums as a source of information. It seems like it's much less efficient to store tons of information you will never need in your local mail client's archive in hopes that the answer to a question you may have down the road will be in that archive.
Us non-pro's who don't exclude any source of information, such as forums, often get good, quick answers to all of our questions by doing a quick Google search.
What regex library do you use which precludes a match for microsoft.* also being a match for *.beastiality.* ?
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.
I'm an old Usenet hand and I think that it's had its day. A lot of it comes down to the great unwashed being allowed on my lovely, geeky Internet.
Firstly, unless you run a moderated group, there's nothing you can do about trolls. I've seen entire, vibrant groups taken down by one or two determined individuals and the idiots that feed them.
Secondly, a lot of the smaller, niche groups are dying out because people won't obey the rules anymore. They post off topic stuff on the more popular groups rather than taking the time to hunt down the proper one.
That said, one of the things that has diluted the usefulness of the Usenet archive does come from nerds, and that the posting of junk like changelogs and sourcecode.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
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.
I'm pretty sure people on the Internet back then were unwashed to begin with.
Yes, they were, but they learned. Septembers were bad, of course, but October was a lot better, and November better still. And if they didn't learn, the emails to their admins would often get them kicked off entirely until they learned.
Now, there's no penalty for failing to obey the rules on Usenet (you said Internet earlier, but I'm talking more about Usenet.) Some NSPs will kick you off for abuse (most will kick you off for blatant spam, but few will do it today for simple trolling or off-topic posts) but when that happens they just move to another one.
At least with a forum if somebody causes trouble the admins can kick them off. The problem with this is that some admins run their forums with an iron fist and go way too far ...
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.