4 ms·

I have found holes in google's newsgroup archives previously. It surprises me because it should be such a small amount of data in today's terms. It has enough h

• snowwrestler 14y ago
  The problems with the Google Groups Deja News archive have been well-documented; Google has acknowledged them but essentially said "not worth our time to fix." I don't have the direct link to it handy, unfortunately, but I'm pretty sure my memory is correct. Personally I suspect that the only reason they haven't just taken down the old Deja archive entirely is that they know the press and tech community would give them hell for doing it. So they let it linger on in this sort of compromised state.
  • koralatov 14y ago
    That's a real shame. Another option would be to hand over a copy of the complete archive to another part[y|ies], who can then distribute it as they please. Since the data has no real commercial value, I don't see the harm in doing that. I also don't see it ever happening, sadly...
    • snowwrestler 14y ago
      I feel like it is a relic of a Google Past: the search company that wanted to organize the world's information and make it findable. Today's Google seems to be a product company that wants to imitate other major tech companies and beat them at their own game (Google Apps -> Microsoft, Android -> Apple, Google+ -> Facebook).
      • smackmybishop 14y ago
        Google bought Android two years before the iPhone came out.
        • snowwrestler 14y ago
          You're right, it should be Android->Blackberry, until the iPhone came out, then Android->iPhone.
          • joezydeco 14y ago
            You do know that Andy Rubin had a track record at General Magic and then went on to make the Danger Sidekick, right?
            • snowwrestler 14y ago
              You're missing my point. I don't hate Android or Andy Rubin. The question is why a search company, whose mission was to organize the world's information and make it findable, bought a mobile phone OS (and eventually, a mobile phone hardware company)--but neglects the Deja archive search engine, which provides access to hundreds of millions of posts of the world's information.
              • joezydeco 14y ago
                Because the original goal of Android, as it was explained to me at the pre-launch OHA meeting, was to bring the web (and, by connection, AdSense) to the billions of people that couldn't or wouldn't use a desktop PC browser.
• InclinedPlane 14y ago
  A few points, it's a hard problem, google has put a lot of effort into solving some of it, and it may not be fixable completely. To start off with, usenet is ancient, much older than the web. Second, archives have never been ubiquitous, expecially in earlier eras. The storage media, e.g. tape, were troublesome and expensive, so most people didn't care. The records we do have back then are from a small number of individual archives (e.g. Henry Spencer's). It wasn't until much later that deja news starting archiving usenet routinely, and even then there can be gaps due to failed delivery. Also, it's possible for individuals to opt out of archiving by setting the x-noarchive header or by contacting google. The result is a swiss cheese record that won't get better unless we magically find new archives and/or decide to violate people's privacy.
  • ericb 14y ago
    It is odd because I feel like I have gone looking for older pre-1999 posts that used to exist in Google and they are no longer there. I had just assumed that support for pre-2000 was dropped.