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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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