[ih] net news

[Kevin Bowling]

On Wed, May 6, 2026 at 6:10 PM John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>
> It appears that Kevin Bowling via Internet-history <kevin.bowling at kev009.com> said:
> >I am working on a thing http://csiph.com/groups.  Search indexing is
> >currently paused but covers up through comp.*
> >
> >History is about 10-20 years deep depending on the hierarchy.  I still
> >need to figure out how to back fill everything, the goal is to fully
> >replace Google Groups for historical research.
>
> Netnews providers like Giganews and Easynews generally don't expire anything
> so they are likely to have 20 years of history.

Hi John,

Yeah I'd done that for some of the comp.* groups in the past and it's
the best way to get recent history from 2003 onwards.  The problem
remains everything before that which is really where text Usenet was a
primary service and authority.  There is the UTZOO collection but
Google had amassed a fairly unique data set.  I'm not sure what
parameters they have set up, but if I have to crawl it and avoid
blockage it could take several years to spider.

> They cost money but not a lot, and they all have a trial period of a month or so.
>
> R's,
> John