Re:Google Groups has been left to die
by nayroclade on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @11:51AM
(#35071373)
While I also lament what Google Groups has become, let's not rewrite history. By 2001, Dejanews had rebranded as a shopping comparison site, ran out of money, and was on the verge of shutting down. I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in to save the archive. And, in the early days, the signs were positive. Google actually cared about it at that point, and still had a good reputation. They expanded the archive with contributions from other sources and worked to improve the search and posting interfaces. Yes, eventually they lost interest and it degraded into the current abomination, but that happened later.
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> I don't remember many people being upset about Google stepping in
I don't remember any former/active usenet user not being upset! Specifically because Deja had a full archive and robust search, and it was expected that the service would be Googlified into oblivion. Which happened, and even faster than the biggest doomsayers predicted.
Re:Google Groups has been left to die
by scrollaway on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @03:57PM
(#35074626)
In 2001? "Googlified"??? Do you even realize this was Google's first acquisition?
Either you're making things up, or you are rewriting history as GP said.
Yes, Googlified - it was not resurrected and operated separately as-was, but immediately stuffed into Google Groups. I and many others considered Google Groups to be vastly worse than Deja News. I even found this subthread because my first instinct was to CMD-F and search for 'deja' when I saw a Groups-related discussion was happening.
Google still had a broadly positive reputation among technical people in 2011, let alone 2001.
My recollection is that Google of that time still believed its own "Dont' be Evil" mantra, and so did its users.
DejaNews was going down, and Google with their buckets of money and great technology stepped in to save it. The initial expectation was that it'd just keep going, maybe with better integration of Usenet content with Google's search (which was a desirable thing, because so much history and detail was locked up in Usenet archives).
Google of 2001 is not the Google of 2023. If anything its the exact opposite.