What's Happened to Google Groups?

They haven't started making money off it yet, but they are preparing for such a move. They cannot get the ad business going until they have organized the archives in a way which forces people to see the ads. Anyway, it is impossible to retrieve the messages in a form which is really useful.

I looked at the google search result listings of messages today.

I usually quote a few lines of the message when I write a reply, and those lines are from my opponent(s) in the discussion.

Earlier you could see that those lines are not written by me, because there is one or more arrows at the beginning of every quoted line.

When google removes the arrows, and shows the first two lines of text for every message in a listing it looks like I have the views of my opponents.

Imagine a discussion between nazis and jews, for example, then all the jews would look like nazis in the google groups listing, and all the nazis would look like jews. (If they follow common usenet practice and start with a quote from the opponent.)

This is clearly not a good idea, so google should stop erasing important parts of the text, the arrows which show who said what in the listings on groups google com.

Only top posting fools, clueless beginners, will be fairly represented by google groups as it works now.

"Bob Penoyer" snipped-for-privacy@nospambobpenoyer.com wrote

Yes, here

Use it while you can because you'll be stuck with: no one-click "sort - by - date" locking feature no consistencies on highlighted search texts no "search - only - this - group" feature no year on threads at a single glance no "view - this - article - only" no links on opponent's name no thread expand lines no quoted text color no one-click "email" no nothing nada

I tried this and made a search on my own name:

The first result link looks like this: .......

Re: Program to view MIDI playback on a virtual keyboard Why not use van basco's kareaoke player? It doesn't show notation, but has a keyboard that lights up That keyboard is so small, and has dark colors, it just doesn't work. You can't see the harmonies if you cannot see the keyboard clearly. ... comp.music.midi - 11 Dec 2004 by Roger Johansson - View Thread (12 articles) .......

The first two lines which are quoted are not from me, but google has removed the arrows, which show up when you click on the link: ...........

That keyboard is so small, and has dark colors, it just doesn't work. You can't see the harmonies if you cannot see the keyboard clearly. ..........

This removal of arrows in the result list is going to get millions of authors very angry when they realize that google says that they have said things their opponents have actually said.

In this case it doesn't matter much, but imagine a heated discussion about a very controversial issue. Would you like google to show you as the nazi pedophile or anti-abortion activist you are fighting against?

Maybe we should start every message with an explanation about google groups way to forge people's articles in the most horrible way to misrepresent the authors views.

If they are going to quote a few lines of the message in the listing we could at least demand that they take the quote from the authors first own lines, not his opponent's lines, which have arrows in front of them in the original message.

Roger, you've provided the solution! At least temporarily.

It seems that Google Australia works just like the Good Ol' Google we all used to know. Just go to

There's no tell>I tried this and made a search on my own name:

One thing I noticed is the posting delay time has been reduced from several hours to just a couple minutes. I see 34 posts here and only 32 on the old system. It may take 9 hours for this post to show up on the old system, but it's here immediately.

-Bill

"Roger Johansson" wrote

millions of

things their

I didn't notice that change, now I do. Why don't we copyright all the stuff we posted to Usenet. And anybody who tries to links people to this information is the traffiicking copyrighted info. If anything we write is automatically coyrighted then Google should better stop making authors angry, or else...

Google should at least color code them instead of using ">," ">>," ">>>>>>," or nothing at all on the author's search results. They believe the "arrows" are wasting space. But they really don't.

Here's another one.

I think the reason is that they want to remove everything which can disturb or confuse a lot of people who do not understand these arrows. They want to streamline the web pages for many more possible users, hundreds of millions of people who have no idea about how written discussions work in usenet and mail, so they can get a lot of clicks.

Clicks show the degree of exposure a web site gets, and the income from that web site is determined by how much exposure the commercial corporativists think they are getting by placing their ads on that web site. Exposure is measured in clicks.

That is why so many web sites are very confusing and you have jump around among many pages before you find what you are after. It is the same principle as in supermarkets, the milk is often placed in the most remote section of the store, so the customers are exposed to other stuff they can be fooled into buying for as long as possible while walking through the whole store twice to get the milk.

This causes a lot of extra work and unnecessary buying, and reduces the possible bandwidth of internet with 95 %.

Just found a major bug in the new Google Groups everyone might want to be aware of. Even though the faq at google says your email (see below) is protected when posting, if someone replies to your post your email is shown in the header. Ooops..... BTW, the email thats shown is the one you have to use to register so there no such thing as using a masked email.

Is my email address visible on the web when I post to a group?

When your message is posted to a group, Google Groups masks your email address on the web to prevent automated computer programs from harvesting it for spamming purposes. If, however, you send out your post via email or to Usenet, your email address will be visible to anyone who receives it.

The bug is that they mangle the email addresses when displaying messages over there, not that they don't mangle email addresses when the messages leave their system.

But it turns out they've set things up so people can reply to old messages, which is ultimately a far more serious "bug". Connect that with their creation of the illusion that "google groups" is something web-based that has nothing to do with Usenet, and this is more dangerous. While I can't quite see why people are suddenly seeking out old threads to reply to, now these idiots can suddenly post replies to old messages, complete without any quoting, so nobody has any idea of what they are talking about.

Micahel