I'm impressed that Giganews maintains a 10-year archive of Usenet, I suspect that would break most newsreaders.
A lot of the big usenet providers have at least a decade's worth of article retention at this point (even for binary newsgroups).
Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get that Google essentially walked back from an at least implied role as an information archivist. But I still don't really get why they so completely abandoned things like Google Groups given the truly minuscule resources to maintain them at some low level.
Nobody can get promoted for improvements like that. It would only garner goodwill with a tiny customer base and it’s not clear how that would translate to revenue or user growth on other products
Totally agree, but I kinda feel (and this is solely my opinion) that much as it's our collective responsibility to donate to worthwhile causes, gigantic tech companies should spend rounding-error money on good digital causes like this.
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search is abysmal these days. I'll look for a term with 3 words and it almost always throws out one word, giving me useless results.
”You searched for Stockholm Syndrome Research. Here’s a bunch of Stockholm travel blogs! They’re just missing two of your keywords, but they’re really popular with other visitors”
I think is possible to have the verbatim option active all the time, but I don't remember how.
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Search is abysmal these days. I'll look for a term with 3 words and it almost always throws out one word, giving me useless results.
”You searched for Stockholm Syndrome Research. Here’s a bunch of Stockholm travel blogs! They’re just missing two of your keywords, but they’re really popular with other visitors”
And the people who simply accept this have...
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#25Usenet article periodically get promoted to the front page. I wonder what that says about the age demographics of HN, given that Usenet hasn't been significant in maybe 20 years (and even then it was a niche). Is the younger generation here? And if not here, where?
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#26> After a month I had most newsgroups - excepting binaries - and it came to 800GB.
> Trying to index THAT lot was impossible
Stupid question, but why would indexing 800GB of newsgroup postings be impossible?
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#27Thank you!
If I read it right, humanity has lost 1991-2003 to Google though, correct?
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#28It's great to see some Usenet archives out there to partly make up for the disappointment of Google Groups. But I'm sad that this archive seems to be incomplete, even within its stated date range. Back in the day, I was active on rec.arts.books.tolkien and alt.fan.tolkien: in this archive, I can't find any trace of the massive "alt." hierarchy at all, and the list of files for the "rec." hierarchy doesn't include the…
It looks like the downloads are grouped by top level group. So you can go to https://archive.org/download/gna-rec and see all archived groups that are in the rec hierarchy.
It looks like alt is missing, sadly.
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#29It's pretty sad that a bunch of people sent historical Usenet archives to Google, they imported them into Google Groups, and then... basically hid/lost access to it over time. I assume the data is in GFS somewhere but it may never see the light of day. But maybe we just need to shame them every decade: https://www.wired.com/2009/10/usenet/
Google Groups was great when they first acquired all those archives! It just got progressively worse and worse over time, and I've never understood why. (Stagnation I could understand, but how did the same searches get less effective?)
I wish Google would donate those logs to archive.org and maybe even some servers. Idk why some of these tech giants never donate to projects that care about the internet the very thing which drives their profits.
Re: Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like the downloads are grouped by top level group. So you can go to https://archive.org/download/gna-rec and see all archived groups that are in the rec hierarchy.
It looks like alt is missing, sadly.
There are also groups within an existing hierarchy missing. For example. rec.games.roguelike.development is there but rec.games.roguelike.nethack is missing.