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Dan Harkless
Page created: September 28, 2017 [Site Map] |
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I was spurred to write my first blog post in a number of years because I recently spent a bunch of time responding to an {{update section}} request on the "Google Groups" article on Wikipedia, doing research, finding and citing additional references, testing to confirm whether the claims they made about the state of Google Groups were still true, adding additional detail, writing and rewriting, and trying to stick to NPOV (neutral point of view — not easy when all the information adds up to something objectively negative and all the commentators are decrying it), but then an editor came along the next day and decided that the article should be as vague as possible, and reverted almost all of my updates.
The editor stated in their reversion comment that my re-use of historic Usenet posting examples from previous looks at Google Groups (e.g. Linus Torvalds' original announcements of Linux) consituted "special-interest" (rather being there to illustrate useful searches that had been working mostly uninterrupted since Google first drew attention to them in 2001, yet have now remained broken for years). Letter-of-the-law and "usually = always" references to Wikipedia policy articles were used as justification, e.g. rejection of search engine commentator blog posts due to being "unreliable", even when they showed clearly undoctored screenshots, and I'd cited Google URLs to demonstrate that the things being reported as broken back then remained broken.
In any case, I didn't have time or desire to get into a big edit war over this, but nor did I want all this work to go to waste — this information is inarguably valuable to anyone with an interest in searching the 35+ years of postings on what was for the majority of its lifetime the forum for public discussion on the Internet. Also, I am unaware of any other pseudo-comprehensive examinations of what types of Google Groups searches are functional and which they've silently left broken. Therefore, I decided to adapt my updates to the "Google Groups" article here (and I've felt free to stray from NPOV and insert more opinion, as with the "STILL" in the title, now that this is no longer a Wikipedia article). Unfortunately my website isn't remotely as discoverable as Wikipedia, but hopefully somebody who needs this information will find it. I'll include the whole (post-Deja) Google Groups timeline from the article, including the few parts I didn't touch, as it's useful for understanding Google's changing attitude towards Groups over the years.
By 2001, the Deja search service was shut down. In February 2001, Google acquired Deja News and its archive, and transitioned its assets to groups.google.com.[1] Users were then able to access these Usenet newsgroups through the new Google Groups interface.
By the end of 2001, the archive had been supplemented with other archived messages dating back to May 11, 1981, which Google celebrated with a "20 Year Usenet Timeline" page that linked to various historic Usenet posts, such as the first mentions of Microsoft, MTV, AIDS, Google, and Osama bin Laden; the original announcements of the public availability of the World Wide Web and of Linux; etc.[2][3][4] These early posts from 1981–1991 were donated to Google by the University of Western Ontario, based on archives by Henry Spencer from the University of Toronto.[5] A short while later, Google released a new version that allowed users to create their own non-Usenet groups.
When AOL discontinued access to Usenet around 2005, it recommended Google Groups instead.[6]
In 2008, Google broke the Groups search functionality and left it nonfunctional for about a year, until a Wired article spurred the company to fix the problems.[7][8]
In May 2010, Google changed the layout of their web search results pages. Previously, the types of searches selectable for the entered keywords were Web, Images, Directory, and Groups. At this time, they changed the options to Web, Images, Videos, Maps, News, Shopping, Gmail, and "more", with Groups relegated to one of the options selectable in the "more" drop-down menu.[9][10] In February 2012, Groups was removed from the "More" menu and further demoted to an appearance on the extensive "Even more" page linked to from the bottom of the "More" menu,[11] requiring the user to retype any keywords from the initial search.[12] In September 2013, Google redesigned the top navigation bar on results pages, removing the "More" menu and replacing it with a 3x3 grid of squares.[13] As of September 2017, Groups remains undiscoverable except by clicking on this "Google apps" icon, selecting "More", then selecting "Even more from Google", and then scrolling to the bottom of a long page, where it appears amongst a large group of apps, without any explanatory text.[14][15]
In October 2010, Google announced it would be dropping support for welcome messages, pages, and files effective January 2011.[16][17] In December 2010, Google launched a new UI preview with more Gmail/Reader-like functionality.
On June 26, 2013, a new version of Google Groups was released with features to bring the service closer to modern email functionality.[18]
On February 13, 2015, a Vice Media story reported that the ability to do advanced searches across all groups had again become nonfunctional, and to date, Google has neither fixed nor acknowledged the problem.[19] On July 18, 2015, a Reddit user posted to the History subreddit with an update of a subset of the links from Google's 2001 "20 Year Usenet Timeline" post, using the new URL format, which, instead of being based on the Message-ID from the post as in the past,[2] was based on an undocumented unique ID internal to Google.[20]
On March 29, 2016, a technology blogger posted about Google's semi-abandonment of Groups, and compared them to those responsible for destroying the Library of Alexandria. It was noted that though Linus Torvalds' original post from 1991 announcing that he was working on Linux could be accessed on Google Groups if one already knew the URL, trying to find it with a search across all groups was practically impossible. Searching for Linus' email address used for the post yielded zero results if sorted by date. Sorting instead by relevance resulted in two irrelevant posts not by Torvalds. The author noted that even if one did already know the URL of the message, there was no guarantee that the opaque Google unique ID would continue to allow the post to be located in the future.[21]
As of September 2017, this situation remains. A search for Linus Torvalds'
old main email address given in his post returns no results if sorted by
date.[22] Sorted by
relevance, the same search term returns the two unrelated results from 2005
and 2007.[23]
Searching for the unique Message-ID of the post returns no results if sorted
by date.[24] When
sorted by relevance, five posts from between 2001 and 2007 are returned, but
none in the comp.os.minix newsgroup where Torvalds posted his 1991
original.[25]
Searching for unique phrases or keyword collections from the posting, such as
"protable (uses 386 task switching etc)" [sic] does return
results that include the "What would you like to see most in minix?" thread
started in 1991 by Torvalds, although threads are listed by the last post
made to them, in this case a post from 2017 not by Linus.[26]
Searching for something like the first post to contain Osama bin
Laden are generally no longer possible, since the "Sorted by date"
view can now only sort from newest to oldest, and displaying the next group
of about 20 results requires repeatedly scrolling to the bottom of the page,
waiting for those to load via dynamic HTML update, scrolling again, and so
on, in "infinite scroll" fashion, until one has eventually loaded the almost
6,000 results for that query (presuming that is actually a complete list,
which is very questionable) and can see the oldest one.[27] Other examples
clearly do not return complete lists of results; searching for
microsoft across all groups returns only 15 posts if
sorted by date, or 17 posts if sorted by relevance![28][29]
As noted in the Vice story, Google Groups does retain the ability to do
advanced searches if they are restricted to a single newsgroup.[19] For instance, if
currently viewing a thread from the comp.os.minix group, a triangle drop-down
menu indicator appears on the right side of the search box which can be
clicked on to reveal the options "Search within" (a specific group),
"Subject", "Has the words", "Does not have the words", "Message ID", "Posted
by" (or "Not posted by"), "Posted after", "Posted before", "Include only
these types of topics" (e.g. "has attachments" or "has been responded to"),
and "Exclude these types of topics". There are also textual search operator
equivalents of these options, though they are currently undocumented and must
be determined experimentally.[36] For instance, a search for
subject:like AND protable AND -windows AND authorname:Torvalds AND
after:1991/1/1 AND before:1991/12/31 AND is:responded AND
-has:attachment will properly return the thread started by
Torvalds.[30]
However, performing the same search from the comp.os.minix newsgroup's main
page (the topic view), results in a URL containing the string topicsearchin rather than
searchin, and unexpectedly returns no results.[31] In my testing, this
non-working topicsearchin was also used unpredictably at other
times when not viewing topics, requiring manually editing the URL to remove
"topic" and resubmitting it to get results. Search results pages lack the
advanced search drop-down entirely, but returning to a view of one of the
threads in comp.os.minix and doing a search for the Message-ID of Torvalds'
original post also succeeds (assuming it doesn't decide to use a
topicsearchin).[32]
Even if one works around the topicsearchin problem, though, a
search for the email address from which Linus made his original post still
fails with this single-newsgroup search interface.[33] This is likely a side-effect of the
anti-spam censoring of email addresses that Google does until one is clicked
on and a CAPTCHA successfully performed, but searching for the
censored version of the email address also returns no results.[34] (Note: Exposing
someone's email addresses in plaintext is not something I'd normally do, but
Linus' old helskini.fi email addresses are already well-exposed on the web,
and presumably no longer forward to his current email address.)
Although advanced searches that are within single newsgroups are functional if they avoid the above limitations, use-cases where the user only needs to search in a single known newsgroup, or only a handful of them, represent a small percentage of useful Usenet searches. The researcher interviewed for the Vice article stated, "Advanced searches within specific groups appear to be working, but that's hardly useful for any form of research—be it casual or academic."[19]
Collectively, Vice, Slashdot, and Wired commentators have criticized Google for this
unannounced discontinuation of the Google Groups Advanced Search page and the
subsequent inability to perform advanced searches across all groups. This
regression leaves it nearly impossible to find postings without either
knowing keywords from them that are unique across the entire 35+-year archive
of posts, or else knowing beforehand which newsgroup(s) they were posted
in.[35][7][8][19] And as other
commentators have since noted, even simple searches across all groups,
e.g. microsoft, repeatably fail to return correct results.[21][28][29]
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Dan Harkless
Page created: September 28, 2017 [Site Map] |
Validated HTML 5 +
CSS Last modified: September 11, 2025 |