Google acquires Dejanews...

[Hacksaw]

The Usenet archives are one of the most precious resources on the Internet, and I'm glad to see them being handled by a company who (thus far) has their act together. Dejanews has been slipping the past few years, especially since it shifted its focus from netnews to precision buying. That was one combination I never did understand. Deja blew it big time, just like AltaVista did-- it was theirs to lose and they couldn't run with the ball.

I'm a little disappointed that Google didn't keep Deja alive until they were ready to roll out their own version, which I hope looks quite a bit different from the web search page they now use. But I do have faith in Google for doing this right-- they beat out AV at their own game, and a news archive will be a great addition to their search engine. I'm looking forward to see what they make of it.

So, is anyone as lost as I am without having the newsgroups for reference? Any thoughts on what the future holds for Usenet?

[Undertoad]

Google seems to really "get it" in every way.

When everyone else was playing follow the leader in how to make money on the net, Google played it calm. The normal way to go, when they first appeared, would be to turn the search engine front page into a massive portal page. Everyone else did that, blew the usability, put up these huge front pages that took forever to load and contained all kinds of crap that nobody cares about. Google said they'd have a different business model and a year later, everyone's licensing their search. Some of the lesser search engines are almost dead.

Deja was playing fast and evil all along. Their "power search" was effective enough, but when the time came to browse the results, it became painful!

I do worry that Usenet will be a less-effective community resource in the long run. Because of spam, lack of any effective moderation, mostly crappy user interfaces, the binaries problem, etc. web-based communities are the future. By then I hope that Google will have unified search of the web-based communities. Or something.

[failsafe]

Originally posted by Tony Shepps
Google seems to really "get it" in every way.

When everyone else was playing follow the leader in how to make money on the net, Google played it calm. The normal way to go, when they first appeared, would be to turn the search engine front page into a massive portal page. Everyone else did that, blew the usability, put up these huge front pages that took forever to load and contained all kinds of crap that nobody cares about. Google said they'd have a different business model and a year later, everyone's licensing their search. Some of the lesser search engines are almost dead.

Deja was playing fast and evil all along. Their "power search" was effective enough, but when the time came to browse the results, it became painful!

I do worry that Usenet will be a less-effective community resource in the long run. Because of spam, lack of any effective moderation, mostly crappy user interfaces, the binaries problem, etc. web-based communities are the future. By then I hope that Google will have unified search of the web-based communities. Or something.

Also, part of Google's "cool" approach (and business strategy) probably was the $25 M + and expertise they got from KPCB (one of the premier valley VC's). That never hurts!

[tw]

Originally posted by Tony Shepps
Google seems to really "get it" in every way. ...

Before using Deja, I was using another, better newsgroup search engine. Forgot the name. It went belly up. Now I have been using Google to search known keywords that returned great information in Deja. Google fails to locate many posts I know exist in the newsgroup database.

You may have found the long list of Deja search results confusing, but I had found them to be very complete. My gripe with Deja was that it did not always properly flag me when new posts appeared in a thread I participated in.

Of course, I am looking forward to how well Google implements their newsgroup access - since I know of no other newsgroup database/search engine.