Re: <nettime> Usenet archives sold?

["Alberto Gaitán" <alberto@null.net>]

Rhonda seems to be making a tempest in a teapot about this 
news, which is actually good, IMHO.

I have been using Deja regularly since it was dejanews.com, and 
lamented their rolling off-line a significant amount of their archive in 
the past years. They were in financial trouble and had to do that, 
they said. 

Whereas Usenet is a public resource, I'm pretty sure that no 
reasonable person wouldn't consider a private archive of the usenet, 
such as Deja's, to be public, since it lives on their servers and 
they're under no obligation to archive messages for us in the first 
place.

All that is moot. In their press release, Google says that it'll make 
ALL the messages available, and will implement improved search 
tools.

Please note the following statement from the release: "Once the 
full Deja Usenet archive is added, users will be able to search and 
browse more than 500 million archived messages with the speed 
and efficiency of a Google search. In addition to expanding the 
amount of searchable data, Google will soon provide improved 
browsing capabilities and newsgroup posting.  "

Google is the one search engine out there that works, where I can 
go and not be bombarded with ads in the process of conducting a 
search. I like Google!

The way I see it, there's little to worry about other than starting 
another Inbox clogging campaign.

Alberto Gaitán


-:=====  On 13 Feb 2001, Ronda Hauben wrote:  =====:-

> 
> There is a press release at google that they have bought the Usenet
> archives from deja.com.
> http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease48.html
 <...>

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