They also greatly changed the way Deja News worked. Ruined it, if you asked people at the time.
It still does, try slrn and nntp.
The web interface part of it
Sure, but who uses that?
Lots of people did, back when their ISP didn't offer newsgroup access. Plus it had a great search interface and some other features I don't remember.
Fair enough.
They also took great care in collecting old magnetic tapes of historical netnews history that would have long been lost to bit rot history and restored gaps in DejaNews's archive. Google deserves a lot of credit for this.
DejaNews had ruined how DejaNews operated long before Google got its hands on it. By the end vast chunks of the archive had disappeared and then there was their bizarre and disastrous pivot into being a product recommendation/review site.