Usenet searching
Jojimbo
well? It's because searching doesn't work right. Google has admitted
it and claims to have fixed at least one bug. I've had very hard time
finding an article from last summer, in fact I tried so many different
searches, then google thought I was a bot and rejected this post. See
the following article.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet/
Regards, Jim
JF Mezei
> Ever wonder why searching comp.os.vms with google doesn't work very
> well?
I've often searched for posts that I had made and google couldn't find
them. At first, I think it was just me not entering text properly. But
doing the same search on "web" yielded my posts via some web sites that
had recorded comp.os.vms.
(For instance, if you recall ap post where the right syntax for doing X
was documented, you want to look for it, but google groups no longer
finds it.)
What I find odd is that this used to work so well. Why was it broken ?
Michael Moroney
Google has never gotten Usenet to work well for some reason. I know that
perhaps some was due to their purchasing Usenet archives from Dejanews,
but that was so long ago they should have gotten things going long ago.
It seems weird that they have trouble indexing Usenet, they index the web
so well.
Jojimbo
wrote:
I wonder if when the bought the data from Deja they screwed up the
loading into the google databases so that indexing is impossible.
Maybe the message you see about date sorting being approximate in a
search is a clue. I am happy to hear google admit to some problems,
it was frustrating to not find things I knew were there.
JF Mezei
> I wonder if when the bought the data from Deja they screwed up the
> loading into the google databases so that indexing is impossible.
No. The searching of th "deja" archives by Google worked really well for
quite some time. It is only in the last year (or so) that it broke.
Michael Kraemer
I'd second that. A couple of months ago google was unable to locate
the term "VAX" in comp.sys.dec, inconceivable.
It appeared that it had difficulties to search back
more than a couple of months, whereas in "advanced search"
(which is more cumbersome to use unfortunately) it seemed to work.
I also got that Google message accusing me to be a bot,
quite scary because I don't use BillyWare for surfing.
AEF
I used to have problems with quoted search strings containing spaces.
Didn't think much of it except that I struggled on to find what I
wanted. After that, I just wondered why it didn't work and moved on.
But I just tried "inefficiently used" and it worked.
I'm glad to see it's not just me and based on the above it's getting
better.
AEF
Phillip Helbig---undress to reply
USENET was the first and greatest moment of massive connectivity of a million
individual minds. It is the first and greatest moment of humanity thinking
together (or at least all murmuring simultaneously). It was, if nothing else,
a giant cocktail party. However trivial and tripe most of the thoughts may
have been, there is a larger gestalt in its mass. And unlike the information
in the internet decades later, USENET is nicely flat. The whole is more than
just the sum of its individual parts.
---itfitzme at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet/
The basic functionality of Google Groups is lower, and its implementation far
more ignorant, than, say, a 1990 version of Majordomo.
---RobertPlamondon at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet/
More at http://www.astro.multivax.de:8000/helbig/misc/quotes.txt