Google UseNet Groups advanced search

[Seymore4Head]

Thanks

It would be more useful if Google allowed you to search Usenet only.

[CRNG]

For those interested, here's the link

[CRNG]

On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 12:14:43 -0400, Seymore4Head wrote in

+1 on that. And I was mistaken above. I thought was for UseNet search only, but it is not. I'm going to look around a bit more.

[taxed and spent]

they did in the past.

[CRNG]

On Sun, 07 Jun 2015 11:19:26 -0500, CRNG wrote in

Ok, I think I have it figured out. If you go to

and enter a search term such as

group:alt.home.repare leaking roof

to search in ANY Group, the search should be limited to alt.home.repair. If you to select search for the term in group:alt.home.repare it won't work, because you are asking it to search any group for the terms

group:alt.home.repare leaking roof

which is not what you want to do.

The interface is very confusing.

[Mayayana]

| Ok, I think I have it figured out. If you go to |

|

They used to have a basic usenet search. Unfortunately, what you linked above is "HTML 5" and won't work at all without enabling javascript. I wouldn't trust Google to run javascript on my computer, so I see only a blank white webpage. I also used to find that normal search would often turn up a google groups URL. I haven't seen that for a long time. I don't know why. Not that I really care -- Google Groups pages also don't work without javascript.

I'm not sure you have the story straight, though. There are web-based forums that are actually private chat sites. Then there's usenet, NNTP, an entirely different communication protocol from HTTP and the Web.

Google groups and many other sites that *seem* to be forums are merely reprints and "terminals" for usenet. They make money by putting ads on webpages where the content is already-existing usenet discussions.

That being the case, any search engine can search multiple independent forums *and* usenet simultaneously. Several times I've had the experience of looking something up and finding that I myself provided the answer, some years ago, on usenet. I end up finding my post through search, on the webpage of some generic site that's pretending to be a forum, with me labeled as a "guest". :) For programming, home repair and even car repair I usually find that it's best to search generally. For instance, at one point I was looking up options for oil paint and came across what seemed to be a private forum for contractors. It was helpful. I wouldn't have found that with a usenet-only search. But that's the good thing about the parasite usenet-reprinters. They end up adding all of usenet to the general Internet resource, so it can all be searched in one place.

[micky]

Yes. Last I looked, a year ago or so, one could search in ONE ng at a time. That page was hard to find, you had to get there from a page where you were reading the same group. (Does that still exist?)

They went out of their way to ruin newsgroup searching, and I don't know why. It doesn't seem like it should be the overhead. To save the trouble of indexing the articles? Isn't the number of webpages greater than t he number of all newsgroup articles put together?

[taxed and spent]

To make people use Google Groups. They want to own you (the rest of you they don't already own).

[J Burns]

It told me there were zero results. I tried an alternate spelling of repare and got 5803.

I wish I could narrow it, by date, for example. Then Yogi Berra would say it's like deja vu all over again.

[IGot2P]

Why, sounds a bit paranoid to me.

[Mayayana]

| > I wouldn't trust Google to run | > javascript on my computer, (snipped) | | Why, sounds a bit paranoid to me. |

• Javascript is programming code. Nearly all online risks require running javascript. The implication of that is that websites can do all sorts of things you haven't approved of if you enable javascript. (Have you ever allowed a website to check your PC for problems online? They might have asked you for permission to access your machine, but the functionality doesn't require you to change any settings.)

• Google is among the sleaziest companies online. They own one of the biggest online ad companies and probably track people more than any other company.

• Google webpages these days are almost entirely composed of deliberately obfuscated javascript.

Given the above, I avoid Google services in general and *definitely* don't allow them to run javascript. It's not that I expect them to wipe my hard disk or steal my credit card number. It' just that they're a sleazy operation that's not to be trusted.

I'm continually surprised by how much people will trust corporate behavior simply because those corporations are gigantic and therefore must be on the level. Google is not on the level. (And they've been repeatedly caught lying, as when they claimed that collecting WiFi data through their mapping cars was "an accident".) If you didn't hear Eric Schmidtt's famous comment on privacy, you might find this link interesting:

I think of Google as being a particular type of creepy. They think they're doing good. They're proud to be Googlites. People are especially untrustworthy when they think "God is on their side". Google made billions

*without* spying on people, by using contextual ads in search. But that wasn't enough for them. Now they have an extensive spying operation, creating spying devices through gmail, Chrome, Google+, Android, etc. Yet the rank and file employees seem to think they're a cute and lovable company, serving humanity. I decided some time ago that I want as little connection to anything Google as possible. (Fortunately I don't have much use for a cellphone. Choosing between the spying and exploitation of Google/Android vs the spying and exploitation of Apple seems to be very much a "frying pan into the fire" scenario. :)

[J0HNS0N]

Wouldn't a smart paranoid guy like you have an old sacrificial laptop lying around to run Google (and other scary sites) stuff so you can stop seeing white web pages?

[trader_4]

+1000

[micky]

I tried an alternate spelling and got 3825!!! I wonder why the difference.

I noticed the early line groups:0

So I removed the groups: and searched for alt.home.repair leaking roof and I got 4121 hits. Still not as high as your 5803.

It's a shame we didn't pay more attention to how the previous advanced search formatted the command line. It may still work, I'm not sure.

[micky]

I don't see that as a possible reason. Even if people use google groups to r ead groups with, they still need a good search page.

[Seymore4Head]

Yeah it worked flawlessly before Google started Google Groups. I think they broke it on purpose.

[taxed and spent]

That is the reason they removed it from the regular google search. Why they are so lame as to not have a good search function in google groups is a different matter, and beyond me.

[Jon Danniken]

Yep, that is exactly what they did. It was a slow and deliberate process over the last 13? or so years since they bought the once-functional usenet archive and search function from deja-news.

We have literally lost hundreds of thousands of contributions, across all groups, of peer-contributed content on a myriad of subjects, all so g**gle could make a buck on advertising/tracking/datamining.

Jon

[Nil]

On 07 Jun 2015, CRNG wrote in alt.home.repair:

That's not a "Google UseNet Groups" search, it's a general Google WWW search. They dismantled the Groups search feature - it no longer exists, or at least is no longer available to users like us.

[J Burns]

When I said simply alt.home.repair leaking roof, I got 6279

When I added 2015 to the search, I got 76

When I added micky, I got 4.