Agreed. I posted a lot in the 90s, especially to groups like sci.math and rec.arts.books.tolkien, and there is almost no trace of any of it in Google groups.

When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.

And it seems that a lot of uuencoded content was removed at some point. You can see the text of the message, but the uuencoded part is mostly cut out. Here's an example: https://groups.google.com/g/misc.int-property/c/f2-dV5wVP9U/...

If anyone here knows how to get the uuencoded part of that message, I'd be interested.

You can't. It was never there.

I wrote the first custom NNTP client for Deja. (This was a high-performance replacement for the community, open source client.) All it did was receive and dump articles in a format for the indexer. It did some light processing, including stripping uuencode content. So uuencode never even made it into the archive.

Thanks for the information. I figured someone here might know something.

The final nail in Usenet's coffin was the removal of the discussion filter from Google searches in 2014. Before that, people could use that filter to easily find others talking about something, but apparently that didn't please advertisers who wanted users to find only companies selling that something, so Google removed that filter and problem solved.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discussion-search-dead-1...

https://browsermedia.agency/blog/google-kills-discussion-sea...

To be honest a lot of what I posted back then I'm happy has been lost to the sands of time.

I will say one thing I've found strange is how spotty old posts are. Even within the same newsgroup. I can easily track down old posts of mine but sometimes stuff is spotty within a single thread. I've not seen any true rhyme or reason to what's gone and what remains.