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How to Search Today's Usenet For Programming Information?

Posted by timothy on from the it's-all-been-mined-out dept.

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.'"

22 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Wait.. what? by StudMuffin · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. -
    1. Re:Wait.. what? by B3ryllium · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, the correct spelling is:

      alt.startrek.wesley.crusher.die.die.die.beastiality

  2. Ask Kibo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Kibo seems to know how find stuff on usenet.

  3. Unfortunately... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Unfortunately... by Nermal6693 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I am so not going to a site called expert sex change.com :o

    2. Re:Unfortunately... by chis101 · · Score: 4, Informative

      An often overlooked fact about ExpertsExchange is that, although at the top of the page they show the answers blurred out, if you scroll to the VERY bottom of the page, past what you would think is the footer, you will find the answers in the clear (most likely so search engines will pick it up)

    3. Re:Unfortunately... by Miamicanes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Unfortunately... by toddestan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  4. Bug by interiot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)

    1. Re:Bug by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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>....

  5. yoRu moronsz. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:yoRu moronsz. by Ant+P. · · Score: 5, Informative

        ---==O <- sarcasm

        *      <- neptune

         o     <- you
        -|-
        / \

      (to logarithmic scale)

  6. Code Search by FornaxChemica · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. Wrong question by filenavigator · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Wrong question by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The question you ask is wrong...since people are no longer answering questions on usenet.

      Oh really? Then could you explain how exactly did comp.lang.c managed to receive today, a sunday of all days, until now no less than 78 posts, all regarding subjects like call by reference, duff's device and shared pointes? Could you explain how a medium that "people are no longer answering questions on" happens to get over 700 posts a week discussing a single programming language alone?

      Do you happen to work for that site you just advertised?

      --
      Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
  8. Simple answer: you don't. by acroyear · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  9. This is par for the course by sentientbrendan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. wrong answer by sentientbrendan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >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.

  11. Re:Not forums, mailing lists and IRC by chis101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. Where did you get that idea? by pjt33 · · Score: 4, Funny

    What regex library do you use which precludes a match for microsoft.* also being a match for *.beastiality.* ?

  13. Google has totally fucked up the usenet archives by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google has pretty completely fucked up in their handling of usenet archives. Some examples:

    1. I was searching for a particular post by message ID. It was a post from someone who used Google to post the damn thing, for God's sake, and Google still could not find it. It was definitely there, because if I went into that newsgroup in Google's usenet reader, and manually found the thread, and expanded it, I could see it. It just could not be found by a message ID search.
    2. I wanted to search for a post of mine. I did a search for my name, in quotes. It returned something like 6 posts. It used to return tens of thousands (I've been on usenet since 1984). I then searched for "bill gates". That returned a whopping 9 hits. I then tried some random troll's name, and got thousands of hits. It took several weeks before they fixed this, and "bill gates" and myself were back to a large number of hits.
    3. Now it's broken again. I get about 2000 results for myself, 3000 for Bill Gates, 3000 for Linux. I haven't found anything that gives more than 3200 now.
    4. The search display is almost completely worthless. They seem to be in the midst of changing this, so I will complain about both the old results and the new results. Old results first. Say a long thread has several posts that match. It shows one of the posts, and then shows indented other matches after that. Good. Except that it seems to do this for each matching posts. Net result is that many posts are displayed multiple times. I've seen cases where the first 10 pages of results are all from one thread, and there's no good way to skip that.
    5. Lately, it's been just showing one result for the whole thread, which you can click on to get the thread. That's better, but there doesn't seem to be any good way to go to the specific posts that match. When you open the thread, it will have highlighted a particular post, but there's no apparent way to then repeat the search in the thread to find other matching posts.
    6. If I find a post of mine, select options, and click the link to find more posts by this author, it is now only finding about 1000 posts. Similar results when I try this for other people's posts.
    7. They've fucked up dealing with their authentication server. If you are logged into your Google account when you go to groups, it sometimes takes up to 20 seconds or so for the page to appear. If you aren't logged in, it appears instantaneously.
    8. When you view the headers of a post, and click the "..." to expand the from address, it takes you to a page where you have to solve a CAPTCHA to get the full address. That used to work. Now after solving it, it just takes me back to where I was, without expanding the address.
    9. They are very inconsistent. I've asked other people about some of the above problems, and the usual result is that some people will be getting them, and some will not. As the problems go away for some, they start for others. It looks like they have multiple servers, and some are working better than others.

    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.

  14. Which is why I'd never work for them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.