"Rich Grise" wrote: (clip)The 580 tongs I'm guessing are for hot sheet metal. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ The same thought passed through my mind. The style and construction of those tongs says "blacksmith." The width says "sheet metal." A piece of sheet metal the width of those tongs would be too stiff to bend cold, so we come to hot sheet metal. But nothing in a blacksmith shop would heat a piece of sheet metal that wide uniformly, so there must be more to the story.
Google is the best browser on the net. And screw the politics. If you want to be able to find stuff fast and rather completely Google is the software to use. Their preeminence in the browser market is no accident.
It's such a good search engine that people are using Google as their home page - and it's a small step for newbies to start equating their home page with their browser.
You browse with nothing particular in mind, or for some general purpose; you search for something specific. It's still essentially the same act. Now let's get a life.
Do you call Google a "Browser" ? I call the thing running in my computer (Netscape) a browser. Google and Altavista are "search engines" aren't they? // ...lew...
Wrong, google Groups -is- a browser. I am using it right now to post this message. But I much prefer Agent as it has spell check and kill files capability.
Gary wrote: ) Wrong, google Groups -is- a browser. I am using it right now to post ) this message. But I much prefer Agent as it has spell check and kill ) files capability.
And because it doesn't encourage people to reply to articles without quoting relevant context, thus making it difficult to follow.
First, let's back up a little. It's important to think of the Internet as not one, but several things, the most common of which are...
World Wide Web... the various millions of web sites out there.
eMail... self explanatory
USENET... thousands of discussion groups.
IRC... Internet Relay Chat (old school instant messenger)
FTP... File Transfer Protocol
There are others, but those have been the big ones in the last decade or so. (The "World Wide Web" [or WWW or just web] is only one component of the internet.)
USENET has been around LONG before Google. People used various software (commonly known as newsreaders) to access USENET newsgroups. (I'd say most people still do. I use Xnews myself. Forte Agent and MS Outlook are also common.)
As the WWW grew in popularity, some folks decided it would be a groovy idea to be able to access USENET with an ordinary web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, etc.) Think of it as accessing a radio station with an ordinary telephone. This is what Google has done. They are not the first and they are not the only. Their web interface to USENET is part of what we know as "Google Groups".
Somewhere along the line, someone else thought it would also be a groovy idea to gather up all those past USENET discussions, along with all the new ones that are being generated every day, and put them in a big fat searchable database. And then make that database accessible with a web browser. Several years ago there was a website called DejaNews that did just that. I don't know how they did it or if they were the first, but they did it and it was cool.
As with many things on the web, after a few years it fizzled. They probably ran out of money and they went offline.
Fast forward to a couple years ago, and Google announces that they've bought the USENET archive that belonged to DejaNews and soon they will be using their wonderous search technology on all those old discussions and make them accessible from groups.google.com.
Google Groups is now TWO things... a web interface to USENET and an agreggator/search tool of USENET discussions.
If you think about it, Google has positioned itself into an interesting position. Millions of people think Google Groups and USENET are one in the same... right out of the AOL or MS playbook.
Oh, and one more thing... Google is not a browser. A browser, or more precisely a "web browser" is the software that you use to access various web sites (including Google Groups) on the WWW. The most common web browser these days is Internet Explorer, with Firefox running a distant second.
Google is what is called a _Web Portal_. One accesses Google with a web browser and it has links to a search engine for the World Wide Web and another for the Usenet Archives. It also provides a web-based interface for searching, reading, and posting to UseNet newsgroups and some other non-Usenet nesgroups as well. Google also offers email and a few other services.
Google is also the name of the company that makes all that happen.
Actually DejaNews didn't attempt to gather Usenet postings from before they existed; they just retained everything posted during their existence. At first they made the whole lot available, then they cut back the free service to just the most recent 6-12 months.
I still miss their "one line per article" search result format.
And then after *that*, they incorporated old articles from several
*other* archives -- ones that had never been publicly available -- thus providing content (although with some gaps in coverage) from as far back as 1981, just 2 years after the start of Usenet.
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