They've spent a lot of effort on improving playback and media discovery, and on the contrary, I've heard a lot of positives.

If there's some specific or large deviation from their mission that you perceive from their re-design, I'd like to hear it. I have a great interest in internet preservation, and even though I'm not associated with IA, I would hope to learn more about how people are using the collected work of organizations of the IA and how to better serve those people.

I don't know how other people use it. But for me, that's their central function. And their redesigns have sometimes made that more difficult.

The current version is okay. One of their previous versions hid the search bar somewhere else, and that was very annoying.

As for the rest of the site, I've never used it.

I can see how that's confusing, though, since it's a different use case than what we associate them as having.

Because it's not default, and learning how to tweak a browser isn't fun to me. I'd rather study history, or how to write well.

I also have an irrational sense that bypassing someone's website is wrong. By avoiding their homepage, I'd also be avoiding their plea for donations, for example. But I realize this is an irrational feeling, and the only reason I'm voicing it is because you asked why I personally won't do that.

Without the ability to ignore more recent results, I've found Google Groups search to indeed be completely bloody useless.

And really for many searches not being able to likit the date means searching Google's usenet archive is hopeless.

> But while the Internet Archive has a Usenet archive of its own, the two collections in its possession are much smaller—less of a replacement than an alternative to the data Google owns.

https://archive.org/details/usenet

Obviously the UTZOO collection is one of the more significant ones, but there are thousands of others too, including Giganews.