Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

So, I go to Google Groups to try to find the first mention of HREF on Usenet.

I have no idea how to do this. It takes four clicks just to get to the Google Groups page.

I see a search box. I look for something to give me the advanced search page. I can't find it. (I can see 2 buttons for settings.) So, I type HREF into the search bar and click seach. The drop down offers "in any group" or "groups named". First attempt I ignore both of those and just click the button.

Posts: 28200040, groups: 58

I need to narrow this down. I need the advanced search pane. It's still not there.

I arrange by date. LOL NO, that hasn't worked for literally years.

The advance options turn up if I'm in a group. They allow me to narrow the search down, but not to change the group I'm searching in.

I will donate $5 to the charity of your choice to the first person who tells me how the fuck I can perform the following search:

[HREF]

any Usenet group (or the news hierarchy)

Before 1998

Sorted by date

Bonus $5 if the instructions you give are in any Google documentation online.

site:groups.google.com "href" daterange:2453006-2450815

Edit: sorry I bungled the conversion to the Julian format but you get the idea. You could also click around the 'search tools' sub-menu to do that.

Edit 2: It won't let you sort by date but you can just limit it to before 1994 :)

It only finds one message from 1993 (Dec 6), on comp.os.linux.development: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.linux.development/Pk...

That's not sorted by date?

http://imgur.com/a/FZYmz

Who knows.

The query is meant to be entered into Google web search.

Wait. What. Really?

Oh my goodness.

Okay, so that sort of works. It's a bit of a kludge though.

It’s not a kludge. It’s a way to search websites that happen to have awful search (like Google Groups).

In most cases that works very well and it’s universally applicable. It’s a consistent search interface for (pretty much) any website there is. You can just throw Google at it and it works as good if not better than the websites’ own search (depending on how good that is), but it’s also a consistent interface you do not have to discover and re-learn for every website individually. Sometimes int

Kludge to me implies that it’s complicated to set up (it’s not; just “site:” in front of the website plus your search terms) or that is either not universally useable or at least requires a lot of manual adjustment every time you want to use it elsewhere (it’s not; universal and consistent search that works the same every time).

Sometimes a website’s own tools can be somewhat more comprehensive, sometimes they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to find anything at all.

You're right. But in the context of the largest and best search engine in the world it's a bit kludgey to not be able to use their supplied search tools for one of their own products, because they broke it so much, and to have to rely upon a different product.

> consistent search that works the same every time

+ vs "" ?

> sometimes they are so bad that switching over to Google is a necessity to find anything at all.

Yes, Google search is a useful tool for websites that have hopeless search. I've used it for Wikipedia and other websites. It's baffling that Google's own product has search so broken that using a different Google product to search it is considered not-kludgey.

28 million results with google means less then 1000 results

Google it...

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