What is Digg?Sponsored by HTC
Who knows you better than your phone? view!
youtube.com - See you from the perspective of your phone.
49 Comments
- Yellowphant, on 10/07/2009, -3/+95If only Google could get help from a company known for its search engines.
- jaredchambers, on 10/07/2009, -2/+66I was hoping this would be about books -_-
- Lucas123, on 10/07/2009, -2/+25I can see some smart start-up company coming along and purchasing this from Google and then selling it as a library service.
- noumuon, on 10/07/2009, -8/+29there's a large difference between a "library" of usenet posts and an actual library of literature. one is a collection that contains useful, educational and academic information and literary masterpieces, the other is a collection of largely irrelevant posts that only exist for reminiscing on the past. case in point for the "library" of usenet posts: mosaic. compare that with, say, "relativity, the special and general theories" that would exist in an actual library, and you may notice a slight difference in meaningful content.
- pagemap, on 10/07/2009, -1/+19If that was the case, Google Groups would be using more traffic than the rest of their services combined!
You would be able to download all the warez since 1995 if they archived the binary groups too. - terminal157, on 10/08/2009, -3/+19I can see being concerned about this, but I think the article's conclusions and tone are a bit overly dramatic. It's still archived and there's no sign that the archive is going anywhere. Google could easily fix the search issues and I don't think it's a stretch to assume that they probably will eventually.
- Uklamok, on 10/07/2009, -0/+14Until I saw this article I had pretty much forgotten Deja.com.
- inactive, on 10/07/2009, -2/+11IF it was that easy, someone would do it. The thing is, even thoguh I am not one of those delusional fanboys who thinks that Google never makes mistakes, they ARE a pretty smart compnay. If they "lost interest in" a title, it is most likely because there is no demand for it even for free. So trying to sell access to them is not going to work either.
- mabsark, on 10/08/2009, -1/+10What the hell is the this article talking about. Googles group is completely searchable for me.
For example, if I go here, http://groups.google.co.uk/grphp?hl=en and do a group search for relativity, "sci.physics.relativity" is at the top of the list. http://groups.google.co.uk/groups/search?hl=en& ...
Now, if I do a search within this group for "Lorentz", I get the following results, http://groups.google.co.uk/group/sci.physics.relat ...
Are the people at wired, retards or something? - skipvt, on 10/08/2009, -5/+13Motto change; Do no good unless clear and substantial profit.
- monodelasno, on 10/08/2009, -5/+11And so we see what happens when a company moves into "profit and return on equity" mode.
- CommonSense2k8, on 10/07/2009, -1/+7a valuable a resource to own, and to costly to improve.... a problem of our economy
- fnord185, on 10/08/2009, -1/+7Oh please. They rescued usenet data and recovered the docs that would otherwise have been completely lost. The search is (currently) imperfect therefore they suck?
- whrd, on 10/08/2009, -0/+6Whoa, it's almost like Google is a company or something!
- kidcodea, on 10/08/2009, -0/+5dejanews ruled :)
- joe7845, on 10/07/2009, -0/+5The article is about Google Groups (formerly Usenet)
- thewisemonkey, on 10/08/2009, -0/+5The problem is that 99% of people think "Usenet? Wasn't that the thing in Mission Impossible?"
- Jordan117, on 10/08/2009, -2/+7It reminds me of when they made their original index from 2001 searchable. It was amazing! You could search for anything, and see the results as they were in January of '01, with links to the Archive.org copies of available pages. No 9/11, no iPod, no YouTube, (very little) Barack Obama. One of the most incredibly cool tools Google ever made.
And they turned it off after one month.
They said it was because it was meant to celebrate their birthday, so whoops, party's over. But I think the truth is similar to the Usenet story. It just wasn't profitable enough, and drew too much traffic. Sadness. - j4200, on 10/08/2009, -0/+3truth.
it's only been a year. Google's resources are stretched thin, as the economic crisis has forced them to prioritize certain projects over others. this doesn't mean at all that they're abandoning anything. There is a list of projects that they had to temporarily suspend or halt altogether when they downsized their offices and staff, and groups was not on that at all. i am sure brand new historic features for groups are right around the corner - svendm, on 10/08/2009, -0/+3"Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world,"
Uh.. what? I used Usenet back in the 'glory days' of the early 90's (just before the influx of spam and crap started to make it increasingly unusuable), but it was _never_ the 'paper of record'. At _best_ it was like the millions of topical public mailing-lists out there today, and at worst, it was like your average message board.
While I'm all for archiving the Usenet, there's no reason to pretend it's some extremely important piece of history. It's _not_ like an archive of old newspapers. It's like an archive of random postcards. A tiny number happen to have important announcements or interesting things on them, but the vast, vast, majority are just trivial chatter that's unlikely to ever be of historic interest.
(I mean.. how much of our knowledge and culture would we have to lose for people to take interest in _usenet posts_? I can't really see a future historian going: "Oooh, this answers so many questions we've had about life among computer geeks of the 1980's!") - Taiyoryu, on 10/08/2009, -0/+3Searching Google Groups is broken across all groups as far as I can tell, not just the Usenet archive. It seems anything older than 3 months isn't included in the results anymore.
- bdpf, on 10/08/2009, -1/+4Its all about the bottom line!
What else did you think.
It was great PR move till it starts nibbling on their butt. - pagemap, on 10/07/2009, -0/+3@boogerthecat
It's really obvious you didn't even read the article, LOL. The article was about Google Groups, their Usenet archive service. Not about their book scanning service. - mabsark, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2Or you could do a more acurate comparison, such as sci.physics.relativity. There is plenty of valuable information on these newsgroups, and to be honest, I've never had any problems, when searching the groups.
- Malnilion, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2Until I saw your post, I had pretty much forgotten about The Game.
I just lost The Game. - j4200, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2meow
- mabsark, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2At least they would be the same subject, which is usually a good start for a comparison. Without doubt there are plenty of cranks on there, but there is also lots of valuable info. Goto "sci.physics.relativity" and look up some posts by "Ken Seto" or "Y.Porat", it will be an amusing experience reading their posts and an educational one reading the responses.
- Nibble, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2They link to a search that they claim returns "no results," but I found 844: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/searc ...
Are they just plain lying, or what? - kanojo1969, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2(Not sure why this ended up being so long. Hang in there)
I used groups a lot when it was first purchased from deja, it contained a lot of tech troubleshooting stuff that just wasn't available anywhere else.
Unfortunately in that realm things change pretty quick, and these days people are doing their discussing elsewhere - there;s very few new posts in the tech area, and I suspect most everywhere else.
The problem isn't that Google has abandoned usenet, the problem is that *everyone* has abandoned usenet. It's an anachronism and every day that goes by it's content gets more and more out of date. There's absolutely zero chance that it's going to get *more* valuable in time, so nobody is going to buy it from google and do anything with it.
And yes, I know there's still many thousands of people using groups, and contributing new material, but it's still just a drop in the bucket compared to the volume of material being added to other, more modern discussion services on the web. Blogs, specialist sites, the slew of phpbb forums on every imaginable topic, they are all sucking users away from usenet and the situation is not going to improve.
There's really two problems with this article. First, it doesn't acknowledge the above problem at all, the reader is given NO clue that the entire usenet archive is essentially a library now, with very little new material, and even less demand for search the existing material.
Second, apparently nobody remembers what searching Deja News was like. ***** me, when google made google groups, it was a REVELATION compared to what had come before. The entire database was more or less unsearchable previously. The google effort was 1000x better and meant that even though the material was aging, it was still possible to find what was there that interested you.
So to me, the article is just a load of *****. Do these people really think google has some sort of obligation to spend money on a service that has zero chance of regaining it's former glory, or even recouping the cost involved? And do they even remember what it was like before? I know for a fact that google purchased deja news' database *after* they had gone bankrupt, so if the goog hadn't done what they did, it would have been lost completely forever.
Whiners. - noumuon, on 10/08/2009, -1/+3ah yes, sci.physics.relativity whose first post in google groups is titled "List of educated ignoramuses that post in this forum" ... completely compares to that book i was reading in the library "list of educated ignoramuses that have books in this library"
- SolitaireRose, on 10/08/2009, -0/+2As someone who is writing about semi-0obscure information, the ONLY place some historical data is is in newsgroups. Not just the examples int he article, but I'm writing about the collapse of the comics market in the mid 90's, and the only place for reliable sales figures in that market before 1996-7 was in newsgroups...now the information is all but impossible to find.
I'm sure that there are other people working in other fields who are experiencing the same thing. - DreKor, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1What? No way. It's that killer robot thing from Terminator.
- ragamufin, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1Google has a pretty darn accurate way of telling whether people give a ***** about something (search statistics). Clearly the data indicated that there wasn't enough desire for this amongst the population for it to turn into anything profitable for google.
- joewill, on 10/10/2009, -0/+1All of the information would have to be indexed ... leading to additional cost for Google and if there is no return, monetary or other wise why cheep it going.
- bratterscain, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1What I think is important is archiving raw conversations of these subjects. What we're exposed to in everyday life is a lot of editing archived data. It's pretty cool to look back on the first messages of a new medium and see how life, language, and things in general have changed since then. There is educational value in that.
- kanojo1969, on 10/08/2009, -1/+2Remember, GOOGLE OWES US EVERYTHING THEY'VE GOT, IF IT WASN'T FOR US, GOOGLE WOULD BE NOTHING
Really, it's pretty funny. Who's surprised that the 5 people who want to keep using usenet turn out to be whiners with an undeserved sense of entitlement? - bratterscain, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1Don't worry, there's folks like me "archiving" warez all the time.
- Remelox, on 10/09/2009, -0/+1It's good that you've read every seingle usenet post to let us no that there is no useful information locked away in there. I suppose you are also against the fiction section of the library too.
- Mikecom32, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1No, the problem this article speaks of was fixed yesterday:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/usenet_fix/ - skibums4life, on 10/08/2009, -1/+1Google knows way to much about us
- boogerthecat, on 10/08/2009, -3/+3DOH, my bad. I'll go back to smoking catnip.
The title was a tad misleading. - ExoBit, on 10/08/2009, -1/+1Read the headline as Google's Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titties. >.<
"I'll take famous titties for 400" - nekoashide, on 10/08/2009, -1/+1Did you forget alot of problems with legacy hardware and software were solved by usenet users 20 years ago when those systems were new. The fact of the matter is it makes it harder to support systems from that time when there is no other source of information and replacment is not an option.
- cowbud, on 10/08/2009, -5/+5In other news Wired uses sensationalism to generate revenue. Come on how many people really use this information? I agree 100% groups should be updated to search as well as Google's flagship search product but honestly i'd rather see Gmail search work better than Groups search. Using the word titles to describe Internet posts and thus making the connection to books is just ridiculous, Wired is obviously trying to cash in on the recent Google books hype by suggesting this is some sort of harbinger for that product. Nice try. Now that I see articles with Wired quoting comments from Slashdot I am going to have to consider how serious I take Wired. Yes, I realize the irony of me posting this on digg.
- feynmansrap, on 10/08/2009, -10/+9“We’re aware of some problems with the way search is working in Google Groups,” said Jason Freidenfelds, in an e-mail. “We’re always working to improve our products.”
... and the transformation into Microsoft is complete! - j4200, on 10/08/2009, -5/+1I doubt it created any traffic. It was gimmicky and only meant for a celebration. Get over yourself
- akchrs, on 10/07/2009, -9/+4What good was google groups when it didn't archive the binary groups.
- inactive, on 10/08/2009, -8/+3Wait Google Books is no more!? They were going to be the Library of Alexandria x10000000
- boogerthecat, on 10/07/2009, -18/+2This is very sad. Google books is/was an invaluable cultural treasure much like the library of congress at everyones fingertips.
Some rich celebrity with more money than brains could do the world a real service and step in and save it.
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is