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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

Usenet archives used to be covered by Google Groups, I assume they dropped it when being good was no longer paramount.

Pretty sad that your post was downvoted, since while Google haven't dropped Usenet entirely (I wish they would, and hand it to someone who gives a shit about it), they have gone out of their way to make a once useful service as unusable as possible.

Go to groups.google.com in the early days and you got the Usenet archive. Go now (and for many years), and you get this:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview

Where's the Usenet archive there?

Furthermore, Google is a significant reason why many people deserted Usenet over the last decade or so, as it provided via Google Groups a gateway for posts that were almost exclusively troll, abuse or spam (or, at best, clueless Googlers (like AOLers of the past) who didn't know they were posting to Usenet, or what Usenet is) and Google completely ignored pleas by people in the Usenet community to stop the abuse.

Edit: Funny, after making this post, after trying to find (via Google) examples I knew of people on Usenet complaining about Google, I now do another Google search and I'm greeted with a captcha, due to "unusual traffic from your computer network".

I don't wanna get all conspiratorial, but it's still creepy as hell.

No, Groups still contains USENET archives, ported from the DejaNews acquisition, I believe. I have searched for my earliest posts as a first year undergraduate in 1991 and they are all there, for instance.

That's very good to hear. It pains me to not being able to access archives.

FYI, the URLs for USENET look like this, with the name of the group you want substituted for 'alt.silly-group.radish-therapy' which is an alternative hierarchy group I proposed, that was created in 1992 and is still ... going, at least, in some sense of the word:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/alt.silly-group.radi...

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