So, farewell Google groups. Over the last few days, they changed the search engine and rendered it useless.
Until recently, if you searched for something, and sorted by date order, you got all the most recent postings in usenet which mentioned that word.
Now you don’t. You get some random selection of stuff, much of it elderly; none of it different from what you get by default. It seems as if “date order” has effectively been disabled.
Those of us who posted via this interface have been shut out at a stroke. After all, what point in posting, if you’ll never find your post again to see if there are replies?
Google have been the custodian of usenet news since the demise of DejaNews. But lately they were slipping. Some time back they allowed people to create Google-only groups. Spammers promptly created these every night, filled with keywords. Every search suddenly was full of spam. Google took no action. This rendered the search by date immensely bad anyway. But even this pales before the disaster that we now see.
Curious to see usenet news finally collapse, tho. On the internet, everything is temporary, and will vanish.
Roger —
I just ran a search, and stuff seemed to be in date order — except for forums. (Why forums are being indexed together with newsgroups, I fail to understand.)
For some reason, also, the posts seem to be counted by date but the threads are listed only with the date of the last post in that thread. Which is not super-useful — why not display the post dating if you’ve got it? — but not totally bad.
Of course, it may be that my search was somehow easier for the date order function to handle….
It is in order. But it isn’t complete. It doesn’t show you the thread with the latest post on that subject or with that word.
Ah, I didn’t realize that.
The odd thing is that, since you can make your own very detailed Google search language searches, it ought to be possible to write a script which will search out stuff the good old way. I’m not any kind of programmer, but I think there are sites which collect such useful scripts?
Now that sounds interesting. For I *am* a programmer. I must look into this.
Look what showed up today!
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/11/09/2029206
Ask Slashdot: How to Search Today’s Usenet
So you’re not the only one worried about this.