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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

  "I should briefly mention Google buying the Deja News archive, promising to revitalise Usenet, and then promptly abandoning it. Cheers Google. Choogle."

Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I remember it being a really big deal at the time, and now I barely even remember.

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It's even worse than that.

Here, Google pulled one from the Microsoft playbook: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Google bought DejaNews, rebranded it into Google Groups (embrace) and then proceed to Googlify it, making it less and less Usenet-y and more and more Google specific (extend), until only the Google-specific mailing lists remained (extinguish).

Edit: see https://web.archive.org/web/20010226023947/http://groups.goo...

Umm according to Wikipedia, Deja News was turning into a shopping site, going bankrupt and shutting down the Usenet archive.

So Google came in and saved it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News

Yeah. At the time I remember the sentiment being more "woah, this is amazing" and less "boo, corporate overlords taking over".

Google was pretty much considered the "good guys" back then. It only started with AdWords a year earlier and was barely breaking even at the time. Loong way from "corporate overlords".

Yeah, and then they let it sink as they have with so many other cool things they built.

It certainly smacks of being someone's promo project where they moved on to other things after the migration and the project fizzled out without leadership.

It's even worse than that... USENET was one of the places that Google used to seed its search engine. Links from USENET were high quality links.

It's like reddit as the source for LLMs today.

So Google neglecting USENET could be about preventing competitors.

Didn't Deja become the basis for Google Groups, which still remains today.

Oh wow, that still exists! What a sparse and abysmal end.

I wonder if they even know it's still there? Probably doesn't use enough bandwidth for anyone to notice. Probably just a few people taking a trip down memory lane to re-read things posted 10-20 years ago.

> Cheers Google. Choogle.

This appears to be inspired by the BBC show 'Look Around You'.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Look_Around_You

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