Deja News used to archive Usenet. They got bought by Google. It's now not possible[1] to specify a date range when searching Google Groups.

They took it, they broke it, and now we can't use it properly.

[1] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/73179/how-do-i-sp...

That's the least of the problems.

At some point Google Groups got really inconsistent, where it didn't turn up many, many postings and threads when searching for them. For some time you could find them if you tried several of their country TLDs (google.de, google.com), they brought up different results.

A bit later even that didn't work anymore, Google Groups has spotty coverage, at best.

Then they hid their advanced search interface. If you knew the URL you could still use it. Then they removed it altogether.

Nowadays you have probably no way to specifically search for something ("author:", "group:", "mid:"), nothing is working satisfactorily anymore).

That's sort of the point of the article, no? And it's not like Deja News was likely to stay functional in any case.

It's probably also worth pointing out that before Deja News and Google were ever involved, a large chunk of Usenet came close to being lost [1] and significant chunks of it have been in any case. So it's not as if preservation necessarily happens in the absence of corporate involvement either.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2002/01/08/saving_usenet/

What I don't understand is why companies aren't held accountable for their obvious responsibilities. Google has to publicize these archives. It shouldn't be up to them if their public records are publicly accessible. I was born on this planet and I have the right to be able to get a copy of any Usenet archive Google has. For free. Whenever I want.

I really really hate them for locking up this data (like so much its not funny, like major humanitarian crime imho).

I don't see how Google should have any responsibility wrt. Usenet.

Google is not the only party having Usenet archives. They are not even in any way special. They aren't the "official" archives, just as Deja wasn't.

If you're really interested in getting your hands on Usenet archives, going way back to the Ice Age, there are plenty of ways to do so.

Especially with the huge Hamster community (http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html), who are archiving almost fanatically, you should be able to get virtually everything you'd want just by asking nicely.

Other parties who certainly have archives are all the major news servers.

The point isn't that they are required to be custodians of Usenet, it's that they volunteered to become a custodian, and then dropped the ball on that function in the most noxious way possible.

Tying it back to the article, you can't trust a company to do something in the public interest, or maintain that work in perpetuity unless you pay them.

Usenet is a limited example, a more impactful one would be Google locking down access to Maps, including all of the metadata contributed by the public. There's nothing stopping them from doing that.

> Especially with the huge Hamster community (http://www.tglsoft.de/freeware_hamster.html), who are archiving almost fanatically, you should be able to get virtually everything you'd want just by asking nicely.

What is the Hamster community? It sounds interesting. The link points to some software that could be used to help archive, but doesn't say much more (at least browsing around the Google translation of it).

Hamster is a local news and mail server for Win32.

It's comparable to sn on Linux: it acts as a reader, not as a "real news server" (IHAVE/SENDME).

So people could use it with their regular Usenet account on a dialup PC.

And since it's scriptable (alas, in some own script language), people extended it in lots of ways.

Thanks. How does "archiving almost fanatically" fit in with that? Or is this archiving culture just coincidental?

Coincidental. I haven't kept my archives, even though at one point I had sucked postings for several nights (all of de.*, and the Big8, I think).

But others kept their "purple data" religiously.

A simple torrent per decade would be nice.

You really need to put a /s at the end of your sarcastic posts. HN commenters take things literally, as a rule.

I really hope this comment was intended sarcastically. It disturbs me that I can't tell. It disturbs me even more that other commenters believe it wasn't.

To be fair... on HN it is really difficult to tell sometimes.

Kinda skipping over the part where they grabbed it at death's door, aren't you?

Suppose Google had done nothing. The alternative wouldn't have been a beautifully indexed, easily searchable completely up-to-date Deja News archive today. It would have been that archive rotting in a landfill or that equipment being wiped and reused.

Has Google's stewardship of the Deja News archive been disappointing at times? Of course. But the idea that Google has taken anything away from you or anyone else reflects an amazing sense of entitlement and an astonishing lack of perspective.

That's just making things up. Deja News could have ended up anywhere, including at the Internet Archive. The people running it sold it to Google in the belief it would be kept running. Had they not done it someone else would have.

The talk about entitlement completely misses that Google bought it only to prompty run it into the ground. If you do that in a market leading position to your competitors that's downright illegal in most jurisdictions.

That may not be applicable here, but you should be able to understand why this upset a lot of people.

> Deja News could have ended up anywhere, including at the Internet Archive.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The idea that a company that is falling apart and selling itself off in pieces was going to donate one of its last major assets to charity... I don't even know where to start.

That was the whole problem. Running the archive wasn't a business (at least deja.com never figured out how to make it one and eventually gave up trying), but the archive ended up in the hands of investors and/or creditors that didn't care about that. You may be partially right - if Google hadn't bought them someone else might have (maybe Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, or ...). I'm not sure about that (which is why the Google deal was good news at the time), but let's suppose you're right. All that would mean is that you would have ended up complaining about how some other buyer ran it into the ground. If you're going to make the case that Google got in the way of the Deja News archive's happy ending, you need a lot more than that.

When European style central libraries were first established, they were actually legally mandated copyright holding libraries, as in they were an arm of the government that was entitled to copies of any work published, regardless of authorship and licensing. The library had a perpetual legal "copyright" codified in law to any works produced by any author, and had the legal power to acquire, buy, and make copies themselves of any works that needed to be archived. They were authorized scribing/photocopying centers so to speak. Modern day libraries have shed much of their powers, but those powers are why we have access to historical texts in libraries today (instead of them being destroyed and lost in history).

In light of archivalship being a money loosing proposition for private corporations, it seems that we have the need for an internet/online library to have the right to copy/hold the entire internet in perpetuity for the use of future humankind - that's the mandate of the Internet Archive, and it would be great to see that codified in a UN resolution, for example.