Maybe giving Google a monopoly over all those millions of out of date books won’t work out as well as we might hope. They’ve (kinda) been here before, and the results weren’t what you would expect. For those who remember the “good old days” when USENET was the place to be (before the Web, it was the best thing online), Kevin Poulsen looks at what happened after Google took over the effective ownership of the archive:
Salon hailed the accomplishment in an article headlined “The geeks who saved Usenet.” “Google gets the credit for making these relics of the early net accessible to anyone on the web, bringing the early history of Usenet to all.”
Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.
On the surface, it looks as clean and shiny as every other Google service, which makes its rotting interior all the more jarring — like visiting Disneyland and finding broken windows and graffiti on Main Street USA.
Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive.
Want to find Marc Andreessen’s historic March 14, 1993 announcement in alt.hypertext of the Mosaic web browser? “Your search — mosaic — did not match any documents.”
