Google has made Usenet archives impossible to search | Hacker News Reader

Google has made Usenet archives impossible to search

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This has been fixed https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aa...

Its been fixed people...read the google groups thread....

Links please

Read here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/apps/JEIYhpk7aa...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/"cyberspace"$20befo...

So the way to get things fixed is to get it on the front page of HN? How predictable :(

It was fixed in April.

The usability of almost all Google products is on a baffling nosedive. Google search now reinterprets the words searches so thoroughly that my own keywords appear far from the top of the results. "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X. It misunderstands almost everything I say, and it doesn't tell me what I've just done the way it used to.

There are myriad small examples of this, and I think we've all seen the Google support forum posts where someone has suggested a seemingly obvious fix, and Google ignores it (even as the +1's number into the thousands).

It's incredibly frustrating to have my live absolutely saturated by a company that doesn't seem to care at all how usable their products are.

And don't even get me started on the worst usability disaster of the last 5 years: Material design.

> "Ok Google" worked amazingly well on my 2013 Moto X, but it's terrible on my 2015 Moto X.

It's probably the phone. Speech recognition is far better on my phone today than it was even two years ago, which makes sense given the strides that have been made recently.

He said it works worse on the new phone than the old one.

the new phone could have a bad microphone placement, or simply a microphone which works poorly with the algorithm

I think Google's speech recognition has vastly evolved in the recent two years, in terms of both speed and accuracy.

But I do notice some glitches in search from time to time. Hard to say it is a trend, but sometimes I do feel such mistake should be avoided if it is Google.

> And don't even get me started on the worst usability disaster of the last 5 years: Material design.

Would be interested to hear it. To me it seems to work pretty well in the Google Maps app on mobile - mostly intuitive. What problems do you see?

Floating action buttons for me. I can never remember where those bloody things are, because they move around on the screen, and Google does not really care about the contrast to whatever it's floating on, so it blends in with the environment far too well.

Material has the same issues as any flat design. It doesn't provide affordances[1]. If something is just a rectangle, you don't know whether it's button or not. Sometimes, things look like text but are actually clickable.

There's a Google app (I can't remember which) where a text-entry box is the same color as the top bar. So you just see the red top bar, and then an arrow that indicates "go back". That's it. If you tap the top bar, suddenly a cursor appears, and you realize you can enter text. I constantly find myself confused in Google apps because of that exact issue.

Problems with flat (and Material) design have been written about extensively[2][3][4]. Recently, there was even a study showing that young people are more confused by UIs than they used to be because of flat design. It takes them longer to figure out where to click.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action...

2. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/clickable-elements/

3. https://medium.com/tech-in-asia/material-design-why-the-floa...

4. http://www.matthewmooredesign.com/almost-flat-design/

The title is hyperbole. Rather that being impossible to search at all, the problem is that "the 'before:YYYY/MM/DD' and 'after:YYYY/MM/DD' terms have stopped working, and it also appears to no longer be possible to search by date."

That said, Google's web interface to Usenet has always been garbage compared to the standalone news readers of even 20 years ago. I've long wondered when the day would come that Google stopped seeing it worth their bother to maintain their Usenet archive. Hopefully when that day comes they'll donate it to a more capable institution.

The Internet Archive would be an ideal Usenet custodian.

That I'm not so sure of. The Internet Archive itself has recently made a rather controversial Web 2.0 style makeover of their own site.

Does it reduce access to/searchability of archived content?

Those are weasel words ("some people say").

They've spent a lot of effort on improving playback and media discovery, and on the contrary, I've heard a lot of positives.

If there's some specific or large deviation from their mission that you perceive from their re-design, I'd like to hear it. I have a great interest in internet preservation, and even though I'm not associated with IA, I would hope to learn more about how people are using the collected work of organizations of the IA and how to better serve those people.

When I go to archive.org, I care about one thing: Pasting a URL to a now-broken site into their search bar.

I don't know how other people use it. But for me, that's their central function. And their redesigns have sometimes made that more difficult.

The current version is okay. One of their previous versions hid the search bar somewhere else, and that was very annoying.

As for the rest of the site, I've never used it.

why would you browse to their homepage for that? its exactly why custom search engines exist, and its sure as hell is faster to write "ia ctrl-v" into your address bar than navigating there...

If I added a search engine for ever site I use once a year I'd need a search engine for my search engine.

http://i.imgur.com/vv8LuDZ.png

Because it's not default, and learning how to tweak a browser isn't fun to me. I'd rather study history, or how to write well.

I also have an irrational sense that bypassing someone's website is wrong. By avoiding their homepage, I'd also be avoiding their plea for donations, for example. But I realize this is an irrational feeling, and the only reason I'm voicing it is because you asked why I personally won't do that.

I pasted a url into the big ole' search bar on the front page, and it took me to the IA.

I can see how that's confusing, though, since it's a different use case than what we associate them as having.

When Google bought DejaNews ages ago, I knew they'd end up ruining it. It actually didn't take very long; this is just the icing on the cake really.

Does the Internet Archive keep a usenet archive right now?

According to the article:

> But while the Internet Archive has a Usenet archive of its own, the two collections in its possession are much smaller—less of a replacement than an alternative to the data Google owns.

IA seems to have a bit more than that - the full list is here:

https://archive.org/details/usenet

Obviously the UTZOO collection is one of the more significant ones, but there are thousands of others too, including Giganews.

But they're not just stopping maintaining it, they're deliberating removing features. So rather than simply doing nothing seems that they are taking an effort to make this archive useless.

Or it broke and no-one's been assigned to fix it?

One use case for Usenet searches is to see early examples of langues use on the Internet. Without any ability to modify the date this search is impossible.

And really for many searches not being able to likit the date means searching Google's usenet archive is hopeless.

One of the reasons date search is almost mandatory for usable Usenet searching is that at this point it's essentially a dead protocol. For nearly a decade now the bulk of what traffic still makes it onto Usenet has been spam and a handful of still active pirate networks.

Without the ability to ignore more recent results, I've found Google Groups search to indeed be completely bloody useless.

I always feel like I missed out on a pretty exciting era whenever I read about Usenet. I envy those who have strong memories around comp.* and wish that I could have been a part of it.

You didn't.

It baffles me why this got downvoted.

Take reddit and remove all the karma whoring, and you have the Usenet. I think reddit is essentially Usenet 2.0 for all intents and purposes. You get all of the good and bad associated with Usenet, but in a much more easily accessible format.

Reddit is a much worse form of Usenet.

You're limited to the reddit clients; you're limited to what admins allow; and you're limited to what mods allow.

I disagree. I think reddit is much, much more accessible, and because of that, some of the communities on reddit are thriving in a way that was never possible with the Usenet.

Reading this, I could not help but feel an incredible longing for a proper threaded UseNet client, a good UseNet subscription that contained most of the important channels, refraining from top-posting, using fixed-width fonts, and in general, spending a good part of my time as a youth learning one too many things and interacting with fascinating people. For someone who was (and still is) quite pedantic about word-wrapping and fonts and proper indentation levels while quoting, Google Groups never came close.

You could download a news reader (I liked slrn; other people like tin or trn or pan; but there's a bunch of others) and find a free text server.

Or you could download INN and set up your own local group for you and your friends.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn//

(Perhaps INN isn't the best server to start with! Maybe Diablo is better.)

http://www.openusenet.org/

Kinda ironic that Google employs Vint Cerf who spends his time trying to raise awareness of bit rot - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-bos...

I once reported the now fixed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10236987 here on HN.

I am really upset there is no good way of searching archives of usenet. It is a fascinating piece of history.

I used to have a pretty good screen scraper that would search queries on the Google Groups Usenet archives. Inspired by images like this http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_clones?file=Doom_clone_vs_fi...

I was able to dredge some pretty amazing historic articles. Some examples:

First impressions of the GNU manifesto:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.animation/n...

Furst impressions of SNES

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.video/gt3T...

First impressions of PERL

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sources.d/QPt28...

First impressions of Eminem

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.music.hip-hop/oL...

Steve jobs leaves in 85

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.micro.mac/93SYtB...

First impressions of Doom:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.ibm.pc.game...

People pissed at apple in 84

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.flame/e4-wxFKyUu...

WWW first announced:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.sys.next.announ...

On a lighter note, Elon Musk sharing Virtua Fighter tips:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.games.video.arcade...

hah nice! There are also articles of linus torvalds asking for Computer help pre linux

Don't forget how 64K and 256K DRAM prices fell about ten-fold in a year. I wonder if Apple ever considered stacked 64K DRAMs like the ones used in the PC-AT.

The article is from Feb. 2015. Has the situation changed since then?

Yes, it was fixed last spring.

Looks like you can now use the "before:" operator again, but there's no documentation of it in Google Groups Help.

It used to be part of the UI, they've removed / hidden it. But at least it is back.

I run a public Usenet node, it's not that hard and is kind of fun: http://csiph.com

One of my goals is to eventually build a web frontend that doesn't suck.. Google Groups is pretty terrible. I would love to find a way to crawl and archive Google's Usenet archive but they rate limited it many years ago. Highwinds/easynews has complete text retention back to 2003 or so, and I think that's the oldest I've seen elsewhere.

I released a SaltStack formula https://github.com/kev009/salt-innd so you can see what an inn config looks like and set up your own. Without peering, it would be a pretty nice way to do company discussion.. new employees can see all the old topics which mailing lists are often not ideal for.

Feel free to PM me for posting access or peering, would be nice to get more discussion and eyeballs in the comp.* space.

Usesnet is still alive, but mostly unused. Its posts were not immediately displayed like Hacker News. Imwas a user in 1990s.

What do you mean “its posts were not immediately displayed”? You were always able to see you own posts immediately, and it would take just a few seconds for a post to propagate globally.

It was a sad day when Google shut down Deja News. Google's replacement was definitely inferior and ultimately turned me away from Usenet for good.

it's not just google. it applies to innumerable apps in the App store as well.

The term "upgrade" should only apply to things that have the option to revert back to a previous version. Only then is it a true upgrade, a term supposed to indicate enhancement.

otherwise, it is brazenly a false upgrade.

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