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if I ever needed to show proof of my time there it would only be a Google search away On that topic, has anyone discovered why Google deep-six'd Usenet archive

• Tepix 8y ago
  There was no business model for Google with an open, decentralized Usenet. They tried to replace it with Google Groups and later Google Plus.
  • blfr 8y ago
    It explains why they never had a good Usenet client but why is the content not really searchable anymore?
    • gdulli 8y ago
      I'd imagine that a body of content that's largely from the pre-ecommerce internet isn't of any use to Google.
  • ckastner 8y ago
    I hated Google Groups, the interface seemed so overengineered compared to the simplicity of Usenet. I believe you couldn't even view the (plaintext) posts with Javascript disabled. I have a suspicion that Stack Overflow's success can be attributed at least somewhat to the experience that was browsing comp.lang.* using Google Groups.
    • jcranmer 8y ago
      I haven't looked in a while, but for a long time, the single most-voted-for bug in Google's public bug tracker was "give me some API access to the message content in Google Groups." Ironically, there is already a very simple API mechanism that could have been used to provide exactly all the information people wanted... NNTP. All Google would have to do is provide an NNTP server endpoint to Google Groups (even beyond its Usenet mirror). It's not even that hard to write an NNTP server: it's probably the easiest server to implement of POP3, SMTP, IMAP, and NNTP.
  • stickfigure 8y ago
    Seems like the real problem is that there is no defense against spam with an open, decentralized Usenet. NNTP was designed for a more innocent era.
    • astrodust 8y ago
      As soon as spam started hitting USENET there really was no way to shut it down. The entire system was held together by "netiqette" and when that died off during the Eternal September, it was only a matter of time before it collapsed.
• ghaff 8y ago
  Because they're Google. One might think that Google would see preserving the world's information as part of their mission. I believe they once said something along those lines. But that's pretty much gone by the wayside. And it's probably a reflection of the way Google is managed that even projects with absolutely trivial costs relating to things like RSS and Usenet just fade away because no one wants to be associated with such non-strategic things. Scholar and Books also pretty much went by the wayside though that wasn't really Google's fault.
  • scrollaway 8y ago
    Yeah. To "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/ https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/ I agree they're not really faithful to it. I mean don't get me wrong. Google Search and Maps are two inventions that are so insanely useful, they may standalone be responsible for decades of faster progress. But I do think that if they were really true to the mission statement, they'd take things such as archival more seriously. (If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?")
    • ghaff 8y ago
      >(If you explained the entire internet to an alien, and then told them that Google aren't the ones running the Internet Archive, they'd say "Seriously?") +1000 Mind you. At some level, I'm happier that it's a non-profit pursuing this as its mission rather than Google. But, given the vast amounts of money that Google spends on all sorts of things, I don't really grok the mindset that doesn't really prioritize the preservation of information--and the organization of that information--as at least a sideline. There are admittedly growing headwinds, especially in the case of Europe, about what information can be preserved, but that hasn't really been a big issue until recently.
      • luckylion 8y ago
        It might be that they figure the Internet Archive is doing a great job, and there's no use to do the same job twice. They do contribute, being on of the largest (the largest?) book sponsor.
• sverige 8y ago
  > Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history? I don't know if that's true (it probably is), but personally I am glad that almost all of my old Usenet posts have vanished. I was horrified when Deja News started up. That was the moment I realized the internet is forever and decided to never use my real name or to upload any pictures of myself to anything connected to the internet. Of course, I'm still screwed because I use a smart phone and probably several entities have that data and could connect the dots, but the average person I encounter can find out very little about me with just my name.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    Or don't post things that you'd be embarrassed to be associated with? Easy for me to say of course. My digitized articles from an undergrad newspaper at least went through editors. And anything from my BBS days is almost assuredly lost to the ages. But I've always used my True Name and don't have any problem with that.
    • sverige 8y ago
      Well, sure, but I was still pretty immature 25 years ago. And for younger people, the norms are shifting so rapidly that it's not certain that something posted in jest today won't be considered career-ending heresy in five years. This is the real reason the internet isn't nearly as interesting as it once was. The concept of 'thinking out loud' that I grew up with is nearly dead.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        That's certainly fair. TBH I'm glad there isn't a public record of everything I might have written on a chat board or other public forum as a teenager or college student. At a minimum, there would be things that would require explanations along the lines of "Times were different." That said, I'm generally pro-True Name unless there's some strong reason for anonymity.
        • gowld 8y ago
• decasteve 8y ago
  They rolled it into Google Groups iirc. Then it just vanished altogether.
  • secabeen 8y ago
    It's still there, but certainly less searchable than before: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.linux https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.linux
• camillomiller 8y ago
  Before I left a website I was writing for (in amicable terms), I asked if I could have a db dump of the posts authored by me. It's in my archive now, so that I know I can get back to years of writing even if the website won't be there anymore in the future.
  • lozzo 8y ago
    this is interesting because I know many companies would not allow you to do that. Your work belongs to them
    • ghaff 8y ago
      You may or may not have the rights to post it yourself online, but very few pubs are going to have a problem with you keeping your own copies for personal use.
      • camillomiller 8y ago
        Exactly. Those were the terms, basically.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    PSA: If you write for pubs, especially ones that have paywalls of some sort, it's definitely worth keeping your own copies of anything you've written. Fortunately I either kept direct copies of most things I wrote (or they were mirrored on a tech news site) at one job over the course of about 8 years or it would all pretty much be gone. Even if your pieces are still online and/or backed up on the Internet Archive, they can still be very hard to track down in a systematic way. I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it.
    • cr0sh 8y ago
      > I have pretty much everything I care about from the past 20 years or so but a lot of it would be effectively gone had I not specifically saved it. While you have it - for "us" it is "effectively gone" - unless you uploaded it somewhere. In the future, after you die, it may become "absolutely gone" - as your relatives or whomever likely won't care, and will discard it. Unless you make some effort to preserve it. Most people don't - they never did; it was always left up to future people to do so. For instance, my mom and dad saved a ton of old photos and letters between them, many while he was in the service during the Vietnam War. My mom saved them - but not in a great way. She basically put them all in a box, then that inside a trash bag, and we found it in my old childhood home after both she and my had passed away. So I saved them. But - unless I scan them - they will be gone forever. In a sense, though, that's ok - because they were never meant to be public anyhow. But for stuff on the internet - it was public; it was most likely meant to be public. But if you save it personally, then the site or whatever goes away, what the public had is gone. Things like that didn't really happen in the past - I mean, they did - but there was always the possibility of recovery in the future. More than a few times was something thought "lost forever" - only to be recovered; it found hidden away somewhere, or buried in some dusty archive in a back room of a basement storage area at a university or something. Sometimes found inside a wall. But the digital? That is rare indeed. Even precious artifacts like tapes and manuals from times past get thrown out all the time, usually by relatives of some passed on engineer, often by their widows, as "so much of this old junk". Occasionally, though, it gets saved (usually by bitsavers) - and if we are really lucky, it gets scanned or pulled from the tapes - old archives of code, sometimes of other stuff... But we lose more than we save. I'm just rambling now - this kind of thing, this loss of our computing history in general (it's more than just "the early internet" - we've lost and thrown away so much of our "early computing" history, it's not funny)... Think about the inventions that have changed humanity in radical ways, that have altered our society greatly: The steam engine, the automobile, the airplane, etc. How many museums and such are there that celebrate, archive, and curate information about them? The computer? How many museums are there for it in comparison? The difference is stark. A thought I just now had is that I wonder if it is like this, because the computer represents such a different "threat" to humans - that is, it's the closest we've come to a representation of "us" - our minds. And - as it becomes more tightly integrated into our society, if not our body collective (and literal) - if we unconsciously seek to marginalize it due to fear in some manner; fear of the other? fear of the artificial? fear of the usurper? Maybe we seek to forget what we have wrought?
• dekhn 8y ago
  [ "rafael juarez" usenet wesleyan ] returns a post I made in 1990: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.movies/YnOmYAjQq8I/rYj35VnBUkcJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.movies/YnOmYAjQq8I/... and other queries for my name return usenet posts in Google Groups: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.development.apps/HqFV8-YTak0/nEr_ICYYjYEJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.development.ap... but yes, I agree the search results are not nearly as good as they once were. the search engineers who were keen on getting this running years ago have moved on to other things.
  • kortilla 8y ago
    Why does “moving onto other things” mean that everything gets worse? It’s not like the contents of the 1990 Usenet posts are in flux. Is google just hiring so many incompetent engineers that they wreck any project made 5+ years ago?
    • dekhn 8y ago
      I think it's kind of insulting to say that. More realistically, maintaining things in the Google environment has a cost- the products are always changing, so just keeping an existing system running well takes a ton of time, and that time comes at the cost of launching new features. Realistically, usenet search results never represented a huge amount of traffic, and traffic is what gets attention at google.
      • kortilla 8y ago
        That reeks of incompetence though. Systems shouldn’t be in so much flux that existing products keep breaking. Poor abstraction and tight coupling. >and traffic is what gets attention at google. This is likely what resulted in the huge collapse in engineering quality. People that spew out shit with flashy features for product managers get rewarded and move up while people who stabilize and maintain products are cast aside. The size of the engineering group at google is more than 10x what it was back in the glory days of stuff like gmail, reader, maps, etc. Google now just makes incremental worse changes to existing products (look how slow maps and gmail are) and kills off things that the terrible engineering org can’t keep up with. There are definitely great engineers at google, but the ratio of garbage to them has become untenable and Google is well on its path to mediocrity. A great example of this is that you have to do an interview again if you want to work on something actually innovative like self driving cars.
• kerng 8y ago
  In the early days Google wanted to make information accessible to anyone and that fit right into that strategy and goal. Unfortunately priorities at Google have changed significantly, and the focus is on things that can help sell more targeted ads at scale. Actually providing value is not that important anymore I'm afraid.
• tibbon 8y ago
  I'm imagining Jason Scott/textfiles on an Indiana Jones-like mission, where he finds a hard drive containing all of this, but then has to run to escape, including running from a boulder and jumping over snakes.
  • 0815test 8y ago
    The reality is not far from this - AIUI, the Internet Archive does have a fairly sizable archive of very early Usenet that was extracted from backup tapes stored at a random zoology department somewhere in Canada. So dangerous snakes were very likely involved, at least.
    • DonHopkins 8y ago
      A random zoology department somewhere in Canada??! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer That's like saying seismo was a random nuclear warhead detonation monitoring facility somewhere in Northern Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Adams_(Internet_pioneer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Adams_(Internet_pioneer) If utzoo was involved, then they probably mounted a scratch monkey, at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_monkey https://edp.org/monkey.htm https://edp.org/monkey.htm
    • ghaff 8y ago
      Here's the story: https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ https://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/ One of the interesting points the story brings up is that you never know what future people will care about. In this case cultural and political discussions are typically more interesting than arcana about bug fixes in long ago systems.
    • EamonnMR 8y ago
      Is it hosted anywhere, or just in a vault?
  • textfiles 8y ago
    WAS I CALLED
• forgotmypw3 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
• 0898 8y ago
  Google used to have a timeline showing key points in Usenet history. The first mention of Madonna. The first reference to AIDS. The first mention of the Gulf war. There were articles in Wired on how they recovered this stuff from long-lost tapes. This was such an important piece of internet history and they just abandoned it.
• Spooky23 8y ago
  As I recall it, they tried to incorporate Usenet into Google Groups. It was a mess, and instead of fixing it, they probably discovered that adoption of not-Usenet functions was more used and abandoned it. This is a feature of development based on sprints vs. a bigger vision. That design/development model has alot going for it, but it only works well when the scope of the system is narrow.
• NelsonMinar 8y ago
  My best guess is the company just doesn't see much value in doing the work. It's a niche community and by definition 20+ year old information. It's important historically maybe but not to Google's business. No one's going to buy or see ads on 1990s rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 content. archive.org has several significant Usenet collections. Henry Spencer's UTZOO collection, stuff from Giganews, and some sort of dump for Google Groups / Deja itself. I don't think anyone's built a useful interface for them yet. (Ben Swartz made the donation from Google: https://www.bensw.com/blog/Aaron-5-Years-Later/ https://www.bensw.com/blog/Aaron-5-Years-Later/ )
  • ghaff 8y ago
    I think that's about right. For better or worse, at least the Google of today does not see itself in a historical archivist role to any significant degree.
    • EamonnMR 8y ago
      I wish they'd hand the data off to some group that actually would do something with it, like the internet archive.
• est31 8y ago
  In an article by the Atlantic it's stated that the books at least are kept around. > it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t... They invested non-trivial amounts of money in scanning those books, deleting them would throw that money away. As for Usenet, it's similar: storing the data is cheap, and acquiring it again is probably next to impossible, so unlikely they threw it away unless idk it contains proof that sergey and larry have stolen their ideas from some usenet post or something.
• squarefoot 8y ago
  "Does someone high up in Google have an embarrassing usenet history?" To me it's a lot simpler than that: on Usenet one could find people exchanging opinions about a product while on today's web searches all we find is companies selling that product. Just try searching for anything and see how deep you need to go until you get something that resembles a legit conversation about something rather than people selling it. It was about monetizing every search results page, and that goal became clear to me when they removed the discussion search option from the search engine; that was the final nail in the coffin for the Internet as we knew it. Some background: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-17993.html https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...