I had resisted replying to this but since you opened the door, I too cannot find most of my posts to comp.* newsgroups from the early '90s. And worse yet, there is bitrot in the archive wherein old posts from others that I have bookmarked (web interface of course) when accessed now come up as 'expired', 'deleted' or some other non sequitur.
Someone should promote an effort to collect private Usenet archives and merge them into a publicly accessible repository before it is too late.
Michael
A lot of that stuff IS still in the google archives, however the indices are totally broken and consequently you can't get to it. Google does not seem to care.
There are a lot of postings of mine that I can access by message-id, but cannot get to with any keyword search.
--scott
If you think about the more general concept of information archives broadly interpreted, this kind of "someone" used to be provided by public and university libraries and museums; the Library of Congress; and the Smithsonian.
Do any of these still really do this kind of thing? Or just, like the Smithsonian, focus on glitz and hype?
Could the Computer History Museum here in Silicon Valley be the "someone" for this particular need?
Yep, and the posts survived the trip from deja to google, and then disappeared some time later.
I don't actually know the cause - just that posts I knew were present and even had links saved to just were gone one day, and google said it was requested that they be deleted. I certainly did no such thing. *
And Google screwed up even more the last few days.
Google has screwed up yet again
So I go to do my favourite technical question search method which involves searching just the microsoft.public.access newsgroups and it totally fails. Worked just fine a few days ago.
Start at groups.google.com and enter your search term. For example "access books vba" but without the double quotes.
Now if you just click on Search Groups you get many, many useless, duplicate hits. The problem is that there are many web sites out there mirroring the NNTP Usenet and Microsoft newsgroups. All so they can sell Google advertising.
I should note that there are a few genuine online forums such as Utter Access and, think, the Access World forums. However the vast majority are bottom feeding, scum suckers whose only interest is advertising revenue.
So as to limit the search just to the Microsoft newsgroups I would then click on Advanced Search go down to the Group name field and enter microsoft.public.access.*
And that doesn't find any hits. I *KNOW* a few days ago this worked just fine.
So Google has screwed up the NNTP newsgroup search interface yet again. Ahh, for the good old days of dejanews.com and deja.com. They did only one thing and did it well.
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