[ih] Google's Usenet Archives...Broken?

[Patrick W. Gilmore]

On Mar 18, 2010, at 12:33 AM, Guillaume Latzko-Toth wrote:

> I faced the same problem in my research: Google Groups search feature is disappointing. To the point I suspect it is on purpose... 

Google's search algorithm is suboptimal for non-linked based information.  Try their in-house appliances on internal web pages - not wonderful at all.  (I'm being kind.)

Google looks for links to a page, and from where those links came.  How many individual USENET articles are linked _to_?

-- 
TTFN,
patrick


> Whatever, here is a turn-around, that worked well for me. If an archive exists for the group, for a specific period, you can browse the posts by month, by using this URL format :
> 
> <http://groups.google.com/group/rec.antiques/browse_frm/month/1995-01>http://groups.google.com/group/<groupname>/browse_frm/month/YYYY-MM 
> 
> where <groupname> is the name of the group (ex: rec.antique), YYYY is the year, and MM the month (for instance: 1995-01). So, with my example, the URL would be: <http://groups.google.com/group/rec.antiques/browse_frm/month/1995-01>http://groups.google.com/group/rec.antiques/browse_frm/month/1995-01 
> 
> You can then browse back (or forth) month by month or year by year by manually changing the date in the URL. I tested the method with comp.protocols.dns.std, and found that it was created in September 1996 (see:
> <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.dns.std/browse_frm/month/1996-09>http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.dns.std/browse_frm/month/1996-09).
> 
> I would be very interested in reading other experiences with (and tips for) Usenet archives exploration...
> 
> Regards,
> Guillaume Latzko-Toth
> 
> 
>> All:
>> Has anyone been able to successfully search Google's Usenet archives?  I am able to get basic results through browsing, but anytime I try to put in a specific search it returns no results (even when there are *definitely* results).  Trying to sort or search by date is the biggest problem.  I can get access to a group (such as comp.protocols.dns.std), but it lists from the most recent posts first.  The "list by oldest" filter doesn't work, and I cannot possibly click "Older" enough times to go through 30k posts.
>> 
>> The last time I was able to perform good searches was back in September.  I found a Wired article that addresses this at the end of the past year, and commented that Google had fixed or was fixing the problem, but I still can't make any productive use of this system.
>> 
>> This Usenet archive should be a vital component of my research, if I can get to it.  Are there any other Usenet archives that go back to the early 80s other than Google?  I was under the impression that Google was the only one.
>> 
>> --
>> Eric Gade
>