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Comment by cellis | Hacker News Reader

markmail, osdir. these sites basically mirror yahoo/google groups. Big source of frustration.

as replied up the thread...

[I run osdir.com] Just to be clear we're not scraping content nor SEOing to death. We've been running our mailing list archive for almost 8 years.

To quote Matt_Cutts somewhere else in this thread: 'because USENET/mailing lists don't always have a centralized/canonical location on the web, which makes dupe content more of a potential issue. It's not the usual "Website X copied my website" scenario.'

If you dislike us that's cool, but just know we're not showing in your SERPs because of scraping & SEO trickery. A lot of people, maybe not you, really are finding their answer there. There's a lot of solid answers in inboxes.

I see. I bear you no ill will. I just happened to one day start seeing LOTS of osdir and markmail results in my searches. And it's not even that I mind what osdir does (I did find answers there), but that it's UI is worse than the original site and I feel that the originals should be given higher weight.

Hey cellis, thanks. What I see in cases where we come up higher in SERPs is that the crawler just hasn't found the best content in google groups yet, if ever. I scratch my head over that one too, but ours is not to reason why. I don't see the index pointing to the same content in the landing pages typically either with my queries.

UI: LOL, yeah, it's a toss up here whether to make it prettier or keep it a bit old school.

markmail provides the best archives of Apache project mailing lists that I've seen. Many of the project sites link to the markmail archive. And it's ad free.

Compare for example the Apache archives of CouchDB (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/) to Markmail archives (http://couchdb.markmail.org/search/?q). The former is searchable; the other isn't.

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