Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference

Post by Steuard » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 1:03 AM UTC

mailxplorer wrote: post #12

Steuard wrote: post #11

It'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's my fault (not the IA), I thought I'd got all newsgroups but must have missed some. I just checked the main newsgroup list and it's incomplete, for some reason. My plan though, is to dust off the old code, get a complete list of groups, get them, and then make it searchable. Sorry about that, I didn't check. This was all done in 2013. Basically, I wanted to build a search engine but indexing the newsgroup posts (…

Post by smoyer » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 1:47 AM UTC

cge wrote: post #38

smoyer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

If you put a frog in cold water and gradually heat the water, the frog will jump out ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog ). The premise of that analogy is widely considered to be completely false.

Post by erik_seaberg » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 2:12 AM UTC

Steuard wrote: post #5

wmf wrote: post #3

It'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?)

Post by xvf22 » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 3:45 AM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #10

naasking wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google search in general has become less effective, so perhaps it simply carried over.

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.

Post by sverige » Sun, Mar 25, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC