Regarding Usenet, I was convinced to never trust Google anymore the day they removed the discussion search filter from the search engine, which happened roughly 10 years ago. Before that date one could search for people discussing products or services, while after that day one would be inundated by a pile of pages selling those products or services. They first removed the filter from the main page, but kept it reachable through the search URL, then completely removed the functionality, although people were already complaining. It wouldn't cost them a dime to keep it; that was a deliberate move to direct users searches from community forums to commercial pages.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-filters-gone-1799...

In the last year or so they sold Domains from underneath without warning. They also apparently changed the settings on two older Gmail accounts to make them inaccessible.

I kept those accounts around because they had a maiden name and other services tied to them, I know for a fact at least one of them has an alternative contact email. There's no information on recovery and no way to contact anybody.

Maybe it's just timing, but, it feels like in the last year or so, things have especially been going downhill with them and there have been more Google related fires to fight.

As a result, I've moved my team off Workspaces and I'm winding down that Google org. And no, Google, I'm not signing up for YouTube Premium. I previously thought things were decoupled decently from Google and enough fallbacks were in place, but now I see the company as a clear risk and am doing everything I can to avoid it.

How come, is dejanews.com being gone due to some failure of/at Google groups?

Were you actually affected by this somehow?

Because, you know, this page had been nothing but a redirect to Google Groups for 22 years. That seems plenty of time for people to update their bookmarks.

If you weren't affected, this doesn't really sound like an argument made in good faith.