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Google abandoned Usenet – will it do the same to books?
October 8, 2009 | 9:05 am
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By Paul Biba
That’s the premise of an article in Wired Epicenter by Kevin Poulsen. I must admit that I had forgotten about Google’s takeover of Usenet and its eventual abandonment of the archive.
Usenet contains the history of the internet and the rise of technology and Google acquired it in 2001. It morphed the Usenet archive into Google Groups and then combined the archive with Marc Spencer’s own archive of millions of posts. The two archives comprise 700 million articles from 35,000 newsgroups. I remember when this all took place and the excitement of all of us who had been a part of Usenet.
The problem, according to the article, is that the archive is broken. It is almost impossible to do a search, says Poulsen, in the Google Groups archive unless you have a direct link. It seems that Google has sort of lost interest in the archive and is making no efforts to revamp the search function, perhaps because there is no economic incentive to do so. Thus, the archive remains extant, but mostly useless.
The concluding sentence of the article is worth reading, as a caution to the hype that is surrounding the Google book settlement: In the end, then, the rusting shell of Google Groups is a reminder that Google is an advertising company — not a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
Thanks to ResourceShelf for the link.
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Comments:
I fully agree. Google does some marvelous things and has the resources to do much more. But in the end, it’s the bottom line that drives Google. The corporate culture is not very altruistic. If they can make money doing it, as with their general search engine, it’ll stay around. If not, and particularly if it’s something that’s free, don’t depend on it lasting. That’s why I use my Google mail account for email to myself and why I plan to use Google Voice with care.
Google’s online posting of books is driven by similar motives. They didn’t even try to buy copies of the books they were scanning. They borrowed them from libraries. More important, the original settlement scheme was driven by Google’s stubborn insistence that they need not make the slightest effort to contact the authors of books they’d scanned and wanted to publish online. That’s what got them into trouble. My own suspicion is that if they can’t get their way in that, particularly the monopoly aspects, they’ll lose interest in the project. It’s already generated a lot of anger against them in Europe.
The way they throw their money around, how could you forget?
When did Google take over/buy Usenet?
Usenet, as a distributed/decentralized Internet social messaging entity, still exists. It might not be nice and shiny like Facebook, MySpace, and other more recent web based attempts at social media but it hasn’t died just yet. (The news server (old school usenet, not that fancy “new” rss/atom newsfeed stuff) I use daily has over 100K newsgroups on it with almost a year retention rate.)
What Google bought was Deja News, a site that was attempting to archive everything passing THRU Usenet back in 2001. See: http://searchenginewatch.com/2163511
And Google’s interface to Usenet – Google Groups is not the be-all and end-all of Usenet.
Not to say that losing access to more than 2 decades of Internet history as embodied in Google’s Usenet archives if they are bored with it is a good thing…
I use Google Groups all the time. I read that wired article earlier today and was stunned; halfway through it I opened up a browser window to google groups, and did some of the searches he said returned to him NO results. I got many results. No problems with the search function in Google Groups whatsoever!
A couple of people commented on the article saying the same thing. So, what happened there? Was the search function in Google Groups down in the 2 hours this writer happened to want to find something, so he just had to spend an additional hour or so scribbling out this angry post, without other checking? Or did somebody tell him these ‘facts’ and he wrote his article without even checking?
Or was it something else? Like something on his pc that wouldn’t let him work the google groups search function? It’s a mystery to me.
Did you check yourself, Paul – or did you also just take his word for it?
What I find as the upshot of this episode is: never believe what you read on the internet if you can check it yourself in less than ten minutes. And many, many people are willing to believe something bad about a big company on the basis of one unfamiliar writer.
Sad, really.
Update: Wired published an update to the blog post, with word from Google Groups. Those responsible had heard of the Wired post, and found ‘a bug in one single google group’ that was responsible. Overnight fix — which accounts for my being able to find ‘mosaic’ in the ‘text.hypertext’ group after the Wired blogger claimed he could not.
Nicely done on both fronts — Google for fixing it quickly (and let’s hope they found the only such bug there was) and Wired for putting out the update congratulating Google on quick, good work.