Usenet's Back, Baby (this time, the search works)

I wish there'd be a big publication on today's provider backend hardware and software. That would be nice to study.

Discussion on the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668777

"Too often, I would land on third-hand websites or have to dig incredibly hard to find a suitable result on Google Groups, the platform that was supposed to archive this content.

At some point, Google unnecessarily neutered its archive. Yes, many of the messages were still there, but it seems like the company intentionally made it difficult to search through the engine, only offering the most basic sorting abilities."

For a long while Javascript was required to access certain Usenet groups in Google Groups, something to do with "escaped fragment" URLs IIRC

Eventually that was "fixed", sort of. But being broken for so long revealed the low priority of public access to Usenet

Not all messages from the some of the UNIX groups were ever available, e.g., groups like comp.unix.wizards, IIRC

It took many years before people began to see Google as "evil", but for me it started with the Deja News acquisition and making the data less accessible or not accessible at all

Public information. Google doesn't own it