How to Search Today's Usenet For Programming Information? 230
DeadlyBattleRobot writes "I've been using Usenet searches since about 1995 to get programming information, sample code, etc., mostly for those standard APIs that are never documented well enough in the official documentation. At first I used dejanews, and now Google Groups (Google bought dejanews). Over the last few years, I've noticed a steady decline in the quantity of search results on programming topics on Usenet from Google, increasing difficulty with their search UI and result pages, and today I find I'm completely unable to get a working Usenet search on their advanced group search page. I'm used to searching on 'microsoft.*' or 'comp.*,' sometimes supplemented with variations like '*microsoft*' or 'comp*.' As an example, try to find a post from the 1996-1998 time period on 'database' in either the comp.* or microsoft.* hierarchies, and if you can do it, please show your search expression. There should be thousands of results, but I'm getting the result 'Your search — database group:comp.* — did not match any documents.'"
Re:Wait.. what? (Score:4, Interesting)
The funny part is that "beastiality" is a misspelling. The correct spelling is "bestiality." And yet ... there really are 13 groups under that spelling. I think you may have inadvertently given away more than you intended. ;-)
Re:Bug (Score:5, Interesting)
<table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=2><tr><td class=label><label> Language:</label></td><td width=74%><select class=sef name=lr ><option value= selected>any language</option><option value=lang_ar >Arabic</option>....
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:2, Interesting)
Use the CustomizeGoogle extension to add filters. I filter out mister-wong and javacio.us. ... ...).
Anyway, you *can* read the answers at ExpertsExchange, they are at the very bottom of each website (below the huge list). It is a funny read sometimes
For reference the en.wikibooks are sometimes a good hint (Haskell, Latex,
Re:Bug (Score:2, Interesting)
Google have been dicking around with that form in the last week or so. They _removed_ the date range search functionality, for example. They put it back again when they realised they'd been brainless idiots. However, that bug illustrates that 10000 Ph.D.s can still be appear to be brainless idiots. One thing that annoyed me was the fact that they removed the message-id search. Given that message-ids are the PRIMARY KEY of Usenet, that demonstrates google have lost the plot when it comes to Usenet.
Feel free to bookmark, use, and suggest improvements to:
http://theanna.org/goog.html [theanna.org]
http://theanna.org/goo.html [theanna.org]
(They're both practically the same, one's old-school 90s HTML, the other a little less-so; both will be maintained.)
Re:I've noticed the same thing... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure people on the Internet back then were unwashed to begin with.
Yes, they were, but they learned. Septembers were bad, of course, but October was a lot better, and November better still. And if they didn't learn, the emails to their admins would often get them kicked off entirely until they learned.
Now, there's no penalty for failing to obey the rules on Usenet (you said Internet earlier, but I'm talking more about Usenet.) Some NSPs will kick you off for abuse (most will kick you off for blatant spam, but few will do it today for simple trolling or off-topic posts) but when that happens they just move to another one.
At least with a forum if somebody causes trouble the admins can kick them off. The problem with this is that some admins run their forums with an iron fist and go way too far ...
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to LOVE Experts Exchange back in 2000, but lost interest in them when they made it nearly impossible to make meaningful use of the site without paying REGARDLESS of how many expert points you'd racked up over the years, or how many "best answers" you'd earned. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend hours of my time building value for them only to be subjected to petty annoyances when I finally need to have one of my OWN questions answered. The fact is, I'd say a majority of the useful answers there are (or at least WERE) contributed by a fairly small core group of users... a group they totally alienated and drove away by their refusal to let that small group "earn its keep" and earn enough points to usefully use the site through barter alone so they could bring in the BULK of the users who just wanted to pay and get their questions answered.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
I still get hits in Google to articles in journals where you have to be a subscriber to read the article (in other words, Google is somehow indexing content that I can't see without coughing up some money). These search links are also never cached. I've seen enough of it that I'm guessing that Google must be in on it.