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God I hate Google Groups. I actually need some info from some of those groups and because of account b0rkage and shenanigans it is just too much of a hassle. We

God I hate Google Groups. I actually need some info from some of those groups and because of account b0rkage and shenanigans it is just too much of a hassle. Weren't they originally Usenet groups or something? Initially they were being decent Web stewards of them (_that_ was a long time ago) but then they got subsumed into the corp. as all things must. It's as inevitable as night follows day. Utter shame.

nas 9y ago
They screwed them up in pretty impressive fashion. Years ago, Google Groups used to be a great interface for searching Usenet archives. Now, it is near useless. As an example, I wanted to do some research on early language features of Python (e.g. around 1993). The info is in Usenet postings of that time, surely present in Google Groups years ago. Now, I can't find anything useful. A advanced search using dates doesn't return anything. Their user interface is horribly bad compared to what it used to be. Another example: I did some research on Deep Blue and Deep Thought, after reading Crazy Bird's book. With the old Google Groups, I could follow the discussion of the Deep Blue tournament, in chronological order. There was all sorts of interesting things like computer chess programmers speculating on how Deep Blue worked and people posting analysis of chess positions. All that is now gone or at least not searchable. So sad that all of this knowledge has apparently disappeared. There was loads of information shared on Usenet and the storage space required to preserve it would be trivial.
- igravious 9y ago
  I thought their mission statement was, "organise the world's information and make it accessible" or something like that. Didn't know there was an asterisk–but not Usenet…
hinkley 9y ago
Google bought Deja News and turned it into Groups.
- igravious 9y ago
  That was it, was too lazy to look it up but the Internet Gods have answered.
LinuxBender 9y ago
Usenet is still very much alive. In fact, many of the spammers have left and now target other more popular resources. The text only groups are accessible for free from multiple servers. It's only the binary groups that you have to pay to get access.

nas 9y ago

They screwed them up in pretty impressive fashion. Years ago, Google Groups used to be a great interface for searching Usenet archives. Now, it is near useless. As an example, I wanted to do some research on early language features of Python (e.g. around 1993). The info is in Usenet postings of that time, surely present in Google Groups years ago. Now, I can't find anything useful. A advanced search using dates doesn't return anything. Their user interface is horribly bad compared to what it used to be. Another example: I did some research on Deep Blue and Deep Thought, after reading Crazy Bird's book. With the old Google Groups, I could follow the discussion of the Deep Blue tournament, in chronological order. There was all sorts of interesting things like computer chess programmers speculating on how Deep Blue worked and people posting analysis of chess positions. All that is now gone or at least not searchable. So sad that all of this knowledge has apparently disappeared. There was loads of information shared on Usenet and the storage space required to preserve it would be trivial.

igravious 9y ago
I thought their mission statement was, "organise the world's information and make it accessible" or something like that. Didn't know there was an asterisk–but not Usenet…

hinkley 9y ago

Google bought Deja News and turned it into Groups.

igravious 9y ago
That was it, was too lazy to look it up but the Internet Gods have answered.

LinuxBender 9y ago

Usenet is still very much alive. In fact, many of the spammers have left and now target other more popular resources. The text only groups are accessible for free from multiple servers. It's only the binary groups that you have to pay to get access.