6 ms·

Google has made Usenet archives impossible to search

117 points by tarr11 11y ago

dang 11y ago
The article is from Feb. 2015. Has the situation changed since then?
- jpkeisala 11y ago
  Yes, it was fixed last spring.
- tarr11 11y ago
  Looks like you can now use the "before:" operator again, but there's no documentation of it in Google Groups Help. It used to be part of the UI, they've removed / hidden it. But at least it is back.
blackguardx 11y ago
It was a sad day when Google shut down Deja News. Google's replacement was definitely inferior and ultimately turned me away from Usenet for good.
harryf 11y ago
Kinda ironic that Google employs Vint Cerf who spends his time trying to raise awareness of bit rot - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-bos...
sigmonsays 11y ago
Its been fixed people...read the google groups thread....
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  Links please
  - th0ma5 11y ago
    Read here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aaE/VqPInidInb0J https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aa...
  - peterwwillis 11y ago
    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"cyberspace"$20before$3A1985$2F01$2F01/net.sf-lovers/umAjxGJndxg/IilWbQG3SDcJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"cyberspace"$20befo...
- willvarfar 11y ago
  So the way to get things fixed is to get it on the front page of HN? How predictable :(
  - magicalist 11y ago
    It was fixed in April.
smt88 11y ago
The usability of almost all Google products is on a baffling nosedive. Google search now reinterprets the words searches so thoroughly that my own keywords appear far from the top of the results. "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X. It misunderstands almost everything I say, and it doesn't tell me what I've just done the way it used to. There are myriad small examples of this, and I think we've all seen the Google support forum posts where someone has suggested a seemingly obvious fix, and Google ignores it (even as the +1's number into the thousands). It's incredibly frustrating to have my live absolutely saturated by a company that doesn't seem to care at all how usable their products are. And don't even get me started on the worst usability disaster of the last 5 years: Material design.
- magicalist 11y ago
  > "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X. It's probably the phone. Speech recognition is far better on my phone today than it was even two years ago, which makes sense given the strides that have been made recently.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    He said it works worse on the new phone than the old one.
    - y4mi 11y ago
      the new phone could have a bad microphone placement, or simply a microphone which works poorly with the algorithm
- fuck_google 11y ago
  They seem to have been suffering from poor product management for a long time. I guess product management and practicing humility is too menial to the geniuses at Google.
- eva1984 11y ago
  I think Google's speech recognition has vastly evolved in the recent two years, in terms of both speed and accuracy. But I do notice some glitches in search from time to time. Hard to say it is a trend, but sometimes I do feel such mistake should be avoided if it is Google.
TactiFail 11y ago
I always feel like I missed out on a pretty exciting era whenever I read about Usenet. I envy those who have strong memories around comp.* and wish that I could have been a part of it.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  You didn't.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  It baffles me why this got downvoted.
- steven2012 11y ago
  Take reddit and remove all the karma whoring, and you have the Usenet. I think reddit is essentially Usenet 2.0 for all intents and purposes. You get all of the good and bad associated with Usenet, but in a much more easily accessible format.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Reddit is a much worse form of Usenet. You're limited to the reddit clients; you're limited to what admins allow; and you're limited to what mods allow.
    - steven2012 11y ago
      I disagree. I think reddit is much, much more accessible, and because of that, some of the communities on reddit are thriving in a way that was never possible with the Usenet.
- Ayaz 11y ago
  Reading this, I could not help but feel an incredible longing for a proper threaded UseNet client, a good UseNet subscription that contained most of the important channels, refraining from top-posting, using fixed-width fonts, and in general, spending a good part of my time as a youth learning one too many things and interacting with fascinating people. For someone who was (and still is) quite pedantic about word-wrapping and fonts and proper indentation levels while quoting, Google Groups never came close.
th0ma5 11y ago
This has been fixed https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aaE/VqPInidInb0J https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aa...
mr-ron 11y ago
I am really upset there is no good way of searching archives of usenet. It is a fascinating piece of history. I used to have a pretty good screen scraper that would search queries on the Google Groups Usenet archives. Inspired by images like this http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_clones?file=Doom_clone_vs_first_person_shooter.png http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_clones?file=Doom_clone_vs_fi... I was able to dredge some pretty amazing historic articles. Some examples: First impressions of the GNU manifesto: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.animation/nKfkfLmfzM4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.animation/n... Furst impressions of SNES https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.video/gt3TN5_EnPY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.video/gt3T... First impressions of PERL https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sources.d/QPt288ya0QI https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sources.d/QPt28... First impressions of Eminem https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.music.hip-hop/oLAW4Mlt8Sk https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.music.hip-hop/oL... Steve jobs leaves in 85 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.micro.mac/93SYtBQKEQw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.micro.mac/93SYtB... First impressions of Doom: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/331R_W597JA https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.game... People pissed at apple in 84 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.flame/e4-wxFKyUuE https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.flame/e4-wxFKyUu... WWW first announced: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.next.announce/avWAjISncfw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.next.announ...
- tarr11 11y ago
  On a lighter note, Elon Musk sharing Virtua Fighter tips: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.games.video.arcade/QRFJiSJHN0k/BJv6bXiFBbAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.games.video.arcade...
  - mr-ron 11y ago
    hah nice! There are also articles of linus torvalds asking for Computer help pre linux
- yuhong 11y ago
  Don't forget how 64K and 256K DRAM prices fell about ten-fold in a year. I wonder if Apple ever considered stacked 64K DRAMs like the ones used in the PC-AT.
pmoriarty 11y ago
The title is hyperbole. Rather that being impossible to search at all, the problem is that "the 'before:YYYY/MM/DD' and 'after:YYYY/MM/DD' terms have stopped working, and it also appears to no longer be possible to search by date." That said, Google's web interface to Usenet has always been garbage compared to the standalone news readers of even 20 years ago. I've long wondered when the day would come that Google stopped seeing it worth their bother to maintain their Usenet archive. Hopefully when that day comes they'll donate it to a more capable institution.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  The Internet Archive would be an ideal Usenet custodian.
  - pmoriarty 11y ago
    That I'm not so sure of. The Internet Archive itself has recently made a rather controversial Web 2.0 style makeover of their own site.
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Does it reduce access to/searchability of archived content?
    - tennysonmach 11y ago
      Those are weasel words ("some people say"). They've spent a lot of effort on improving playback and media discovery, and on the contrary, I've heard a lot of positives. If there's some specific or large deviation from their mission that you perceive from their re-design, I'd like to hear it. I have a great interest in internet preservation, and even though I'm not associated with IA, I would hope to learn more about how people are using the collected work of organizations of the IA and how to better serve those people.
      - sillysaurus3 11y ago
        When I go to archive.org, I care about one thing: Pasting a URL to a now-broken site into their search bar. I don't know how other people use it. But for me, that's their central function. And their redesigns have sometimes made that more difficult. The current version is okay. One of their previous versions hid the search bar somewhere else, and that was very annoying. As for the rest of the site, I've never used it.
yuhong 11y ago
I once reported the now fixed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10236987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10236987 here on HN.
ipadbluesfor_dl 11y ago
it's not just google. it applies to innumerable apps in the App store as well. The term "upgrade" should only apply to things that have the option to revert back to a previous version. Only then is it a true upgrade, a term supposed to indicate enhancement. otherwise, it is brazenly a false upgrade.
peter303 11y ago
Usesnet is still alive, but mostly unused. Its posts were not immediately displayed like Hacker News. Imwas a user in 1990s.
- kseistrup 11y ago
  What do you mean “its posts were not immediately displayed”? You were always able to see you own posts immediately, and it would take just a few seconds for a post to propagate globally.
kev009 11y ago
I run a public Usenet node, it's not that hard and is kind of fun: http://csiph.com http://csiph.com One of my goals is to eventually build a web frontend that doesn't suck.. Google Groups is pretty terrible. I would love to find a way to crawl and archive Google's Usenet archive but they rate limited it many years ago. Highwinds/easynews has complete text retention back to 2003 or so, and I think that's the oldest I've seen elsewhere. I released a SaltStack formula https://github.com/kev009/salt-innd https://github.com/kev009/salt-innd so you can see what an inn config looks like and set up your own. Without peering, it would be a pretty nice way to do company discussion.. new employees can see all the old topics which mailing lists are often not ideal for. Feel free to PM me for posting access or peering, would be nice to get more discussion and eyeballs in the comp.* space.

117 points by tarr11 11y ago

dang 11y ago

The article is from Feb. 2015. Has the situation changed since then?

jpkeisala 11y ago
Yes, it was fixed last spring.
tarr11 11y ago
Looks like you can now use the "before:" operator again, but there's no documentation of it in Google Groups Help. It used to be part of the UI, they've removed / hidden it. But at least it is back.

blackguardx 11y ago

It was a sad day when Google shut down Deja News. Google's replacement was definitely inferior and ultimately turned me away from Usenet for good.

harryf 11y ago

Kinda ironic that Google employs Vint Cerf who spends his time trying to raise awareness of bit rot - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-bos...

sigmonsays 11y ago

Its been fixed people...read the google groups thread....

joe_the_user 11y ago
Links please
- th0ma5 11y ago
  Read here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aaE/VqPInidInb0J https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aa...
- peterwwillis 11y ago
  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"cyberspace"$20before$3A1985$2F01$2F01/net.sf-lovers/umAjxGJndxg/IilWbQG3SDcJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"cyberspace"$20befo...
willvarfar 11y ago
So the way to get things fixed is to get it on the front page of HN? How predictable :(
- magicalist 11y ago
  It was fixed in April.

smt88 11y ago

The usability of almost all Google products is on a baffling nosedive. Google search now reinterprets the words searches so thoroughly that my own keywords appear far from the top of the results. "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X. It misunderstands almost everything I say, and it doesn't tell me what I've just done the way it used to. There are myriad small examples of this, and I think we've all seen the Google support forum posts where someone has suggested a seemingly obvious fix, and Google ignores it (even as the +1's number into the thousands). It's incredibly frustrating to have my live absolutely saturated by a company that doesn't seem to care at all how usable their products are. And don't even get me started on the worst usability disaster of the last 5 years: Material design.

magicalist 11y ago
> "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X. It's probably the phone. Speech recognition is far better on my phone today than it was even two years ago, which makes sense given the strides that have been made recently.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  He said it works worse on the new phone than the old one.
  - y4mi 11y ago
    the new phone could have a bad microphone placement, or simply a microphone which works poorly with the algorithm
fuck_google 11y ago
They seem to have been suffering from poor product management for a long time. I guess product management and practicing humility is too menial to the geniuses at Google.
eva1984 11y ago
I think Google's speech recognition has vastly evolved in the recent two years, in terms of both speed and accuracy. But I do notice some glitches in search from time to time. Hard to say it is a trend, but sometimes I do feel such mistake should be avoided if it is Google.

TactiFail 11y ago

I always feel like I missed out on a pretty exciting era whenever I read about Usenet. I envy those who have strong memories around comp.* and wish that I could have been a part of it.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
You didn't.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
It baffles me why this got downvoted.
steven2012 11y ago
Take reddit and remove all the karma whoring, and you have the Usenet. I think reddit is essentially Usenet 2.0 for all intents and purposes. You get all of the good and bad associated with Usenet, but in a much more easily accessible format.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Reddit is a much worse form of Usenet. You're limited to the reddit clients; you're limited to what admins allow; and you're limited to what mods allow.
  - steven2012 11y ago
    I disagree. I think reddit is much, much more accessible, and because of that, some of the communities on reddit are thriving in a way that was never possible with the Usenet.
Ayaz 11y ago
Reading this, I could not help but feel an incredible longing for a proper threaded UseNet client, a good UseNet subscription that contained most of the important channels, refraining from top-posting, using fixed-width fonts, and in general, spending a good part of my time as a youth learning one too many things and interacting with fascinating people. For someone who was (and still is) quite pedantic about word-wrapping and fonts and proper indentation levels while quoting, Google Groups never came close.

th0ma5 11y ago

This has been fixed https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aaE/VqPInidInb0J https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aa...

mr-ron 11y ago

I am really upset there is no good way of searching archives of usenet. It is a fascinating piece of history. I used to have a pretty good screen scraper that would search queries on the Google Groups Usenet archives. Inspired by images like this http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_clones?file=Doom_clone_vs_first_person_shooter.png http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_clones?file=Doom_clone_vs_fi... I was able to dredge some pretty amazing historic articles. Some examples: First impressions of the GNU manifesto: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.animation/nKfkfLmfzM4 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.animation/n... Furst impressions of SNES https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.video/gt3TN5_EnPY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.video/gt3T... First impressions of PERL https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sources.d/QPt288ya0QI https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sources.d/QPt28... First impressions of Eminem https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.music.hip-hop/oLAW4Mlt8Sk https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.music.hip-hop/oL... Steve jobs leaves in 85 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.micro.mac/93SYtBQKEQw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.micro.mac/93SYtB... First impressions of Doom: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action/331R_W597JA https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.game... People pissed at apple in 84 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.flame/e4-wxFKyUuE https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.flame/e4-wxFKyUu... WWW first announced: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.next.announce/avWAjISncfw https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.next.announ...

tarr11 11y ago
On a lighter note, Elon Musk sharing Virtua Fighter tips: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.games.video.arcade/QRFJiSJHN0k/BJv6bXiFBbAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.games.video.arcade...
- mr-ron 11y ago
  hah nice! There are also articles of linus torvalds asking for Computer help pre linux
yuhong 11y ago
Don't forget how 64K and 256K DRAM prices fell about ten-fold in a year. I wonder if Apple ever considered stacked 64K DRAMs like the ones used in the PC-AT.

pmoriarty 11y ago

The title is hyperbole. Rather that being impossible to search at all, the problem is that "the 'before:YYYY/MM/DD' and 'after:YYYY/MM/DD' terms have stopped working, and it also appears to no longer be possible to search by date." That said, Google's web interface to Usenet has always been garbage compared to the standalone news readers of even 20 years ago. I've long wondered when the day would come that Google stopped seeing it worth their bother to maintain their Usenet archive. Hopefully when that day comes they'll donate it to a more capable institution.

cpeterso 11y ago
The Internet Archive would be an ideal Usenet custodian.
- pmoriarty 11y ago
  That I'm not so sure of. The Internet Archive itself has recently made a rather controversial Web 2.0 style makeover of their own site.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Does it reduce access to/searchability of archived content?
  - tennysonmach 11y ago
    Those are weasel words ("some people say"). They've spent a lot of effort on improving playback and media discovery, and on the contrary, I've heard a lot of positives. If there's some specific or large deviation from their mission that you perceive from their re-design, I'd like to hear it. I have a great interest in internet preservation, and even though I'm not associated with IA, I would hope to learn more about how people are using the collected work of organizations of the IA and how to better serve those people.
    - sillysaurus3 11y ago
      When I go to archive.org, I care about one thing: Pasting a URL to a now-broken site into their search bar. I don't know how other people use it. But for me, that's their central function. And their redesigns have sometimes made that more difficult. The current version is okay. One of their previous versions hid the search bar somewhere else, and that was very annoying. As for the rest of the site, I've never used it.

yuhong 11y ago

I once reported the now fixed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10236987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10236987 here on HN.

ipadbluesfor_dl 11y ago

it's not just google. it applies to innumerable apps in the App store as well. The term "upgrade" should only apply to things that have the option to revert back to a previous version. Only then is it a true upgrade, a term supposed to indicate enhancement. otherwise, it is brazenly a false upgrade.

peter303 11y ago

Usesnet is still alive, but mostly unused. Its posts were not immediately displayed like Hacker News. Imwas a user in 1990s.

kseistrup 11y ago
What do you mean “its posts were not immediately displayed”? You were always able to see you own posts immediately, and it would take just a few seconds for a post to propagate globally.

kev009 11y ago

I run a public Usenet node, it's not that hard and is kind of fun: http://csiph.com http://csiph.com One of my goals is to eventually build a web frontend that doesn't suck.. Google Groups is pretty terrible. I would love to find a way to crawl and archive Google's Usenet archive but they rate limited it many years ago. Highwinds/easynews has complete text retention back to 2003 or so, and I think that's the oldest I've seen elsewhere. I released a SaltStack formula https://github.com/kev009/salt-innd https://github.com/kev009/salt-innd so you can see what an inn config looks like and set up your own. Without peering, it would be a pretty nice way to do company discussion.. new employees can see all the old topics which mailing lists are often not ideal for. Feel free to PM me for posting access or peering, would be nice to get more discussion and eyeballs in the comp.* space.