Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions

We can be thankful for small mercies.

Will need?

I don't believe I have searched a Usenet archive ever.

Way back before Google took it over DejaNews was actually very useful sometimes, Google made it more and more useless as time went on.

Well, yes. Usenet is now a quiet little niche in the internet. I like quiet and little

Yes can the raw data be retrieved to recreate DejaNews ? I'd throw some storage and bandwidth into hosting a read-only mirror.

There actually are a couple of pay servers which have 12 to 15 years retention for text newsgroups and you probably would only need a one month membership to get what you need. As for the older articles...

-jw-

That's a standard technique when you're trying to kill something. Make it more and more useless until nobody wants / cares about / can use it anymore; then when you do kill it it won't be missed.

The local phone company used that technique to get rid of hard-copy telephone directories. They split the white pages into multiple books, each of which covered a subset of the local area so you'd have to thumb through several volumes to find what you were looking for. To add insult to injury, each volume included a complete copy of the business pages - an incredible show of redundancy. A couple of two-inch volumes turned into a foot-high stack, most of which I would transfer directly from my doorstep to the recycle bin.

-1

There was merit in having a Usenet-only keyword search engine that was provided by dejanews (which Google took over) and which was available to everyone with just a web browser, and which only searched Usenet and which cost nothing which allowed the user to read the entire thread - not just one post like Howard Knight does - and which allowed users to reference the post to others who also had only a web browser, etc).

If you want to search before you post, then there will probably be new engines that come up, although none with the retention that Google had.

It has always been the case that the worst posters to Usenet were never ones who searched before they posted anything, and for those people, there was never (and will never) be a utility to a search engine.

For example

The Usenet-only replacement search engine needs to be free to all, with just a browser, not needing an account, and having infinite retention.

Oh boy, not only are you multi-posting the OP to different groups (akin to what annoying Google Groups users used to do), but you're copy-pasting your own responses in other groups down in the thread! Instead of furthering this insanity by doubling up my own posts, I'll just put the Message-ID of where I replied in comp.periphs.printers: snipped-for-privacy@news.ausics.net>

Please learn to cross-post if you wish to discuss things in multiple groups. Though this topic is probably best restrained to just one group where discussion of Usenet itself is intended.

You're wrong as each has different information, but this will help anyone find your post about using a standard duckduckgo server using that message id in these message-id search engines.

http://usenet.ovh/index.php?article=ualhttp://news.chmurka.net/mid.phphttp://al.howardknight.net/ But the problem isn't using the :site of Google or DuckDuckGo.

The problem is finding a purpose-built Usenet-specific search engine that anyone can use on any platform without needing to make their own engine.

At about 2.6TB uncompressed, this data certainly *appears* to have come from within Google somehow based on having a look at the path headers on a few articles:

Depends on what you're doing I guess. As bad as the UI has been in recent years I've found the Google Groups archive an invaluable research tool in the absence of any kind of full-text search for the internet archives wayback machine.

The people who never searched before posting were the ones who would ask the very same questions which had been answered a million times prior.

And, sure, the Google Groups dejanews implementation of the no-account-needed web based Usenet-only search wasn't all that great compared to the normal Google search engine - but it was the best we had.

This is all we've got now, that's updated, as far as I know, where what would be nice is if people who know more add to the list.

No-account-needed web-paged general-use Usenet-only search engines:

Message-ID search engines (which aren't even close to the same thing).

If you know of something better for a web based no-account-needed Usenet-only search engine, please add it to the list above.