I am conflicted about archived Usenet. I agree that there's a lot of "former glory" there. But I'm also glad that my own personal rantings aren't as easily found.

Google search in general, not just the former Deja News, has gotten much worse. And that's the real tragedy. It is now one step away from being fucking useless. They've slowly taken away all the advanced features.

Nowadays, when I search for something like this:

   "search phrase one"  "search phrase two"

I will get a plethora of hits that omit one or the other of those words or phrases, starting with the very first page of results.

It used to be that you could do something like

   +"yes I want to" +really +include +this

to be sure your words all mattered. But they stole the plus for Google Plus, and other advanced search features have also been neutered.

But the good news is that they're developing blimps and thermostats and other crap like that!