31–40 of 65 posts
> 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?
I'm trying again on that 800GB with KISS DB (append-only hashtable), and Elasticsearch. Doesn't matter if GPL because it's a website.
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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 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.
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What seems to have happened was that Google shifted focus from sorting the web to delivering the "zeitgeist" of the present. Perhaps because more people were likely to search for whatever was on the news cycle than some arbitrary piece of info. Never mind that Google's earnings comes from ads, not search results.
Google's original mission statement from 1998 was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Things like Usenet archives are clearly part of that. That is still apparently their mission statement but I agree the reality seems more along the lines of "deliver the best search results for users' immediate needs" [while making as much money from that as humanly possible]
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”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...
More seriously, I think a better analogy is putting a frog in cold water and turning on the stove's burner. Things are much worse but because it happened so slowly, we simply have a "new normal". The change from one day to the next on this time-scale is undiscernable.
Search query to the void, but if anyone has archives of the umbc.* hierarchy, I'd be eternally grateful to see them.
Usenet 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?
EDIT: To elaborate a bit, my expectation would be that the sort of young person using HN leans more historically interested than normal. Is more likely to appreciate the value of things like Internet archive, etc. Usenet is a huge part of digital history, and the fact that it's not available even though archives were kept is something of a tragedy.
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And the people who simply accept this have...
... gone to Sweden on vacation. More seriously, I think a better analogy is putting a frog in cold water and turning on the stove's burner. Things are much worse but because it happened so slowly, we simply have a "new normal". The change from one day to the next on this time-scale is undiscernable.
Usenet 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?
I'm kind of offended that you seem to think young people can't be aware of things that happened before their time. EDIT: To elaborate a bit, my expectation would be that the sort of young person using HN leans more historically interested than normal. Is more likely to appreciate the value of things like Internet archive, etc. Usenet is a huge part of digital history, and the fact that it's not available even though…
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”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.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...