[wmf]

It's pretty sad that a bunch of people sent historical Usenet archives to Google, they imported them into Google Groups, and then... basically hid/lost access to it over time. I assume the data is in GFS somewhere but it may never see the light of day. But maybe we just need to shame them every decade: https://www.wired.com/2009/10/usenet/

[Steuard]

Google Groups was great when they first acquired all those archives! It just got progressively worse and worse over time, and I've never understood why. (Stagnation I could understand, but how did the same searches get less effective?)

[erik_seaberg]

Google has a continual Red Queen's race between everyone's dependencies. I'm guessing they were lucky to keep it mostly working and avoid Reader's fate.

"We're deprecating X, please migrate to Y by this date."

"Y doesn't support all our use cases!"

"Neither will X when we turn it off, sorry."

[ghaff]

I get that Google essentially walked back from an at least implied role as an information archivist. But I still don't really get why they so completely abandoned things like Google Groups given the truly minuscule resources to maintain them at some low level.

[cultureleak_ta0]

Nobody can get promoted for improvements like that. It would only garner goodwill with a tiny customer base and it’s not clear how that would translate to revenue or user growth on other products

[petercooper]

Totally agree, but I kinda feel (and this is solely my opinion) that much as it's our collective responsibility to donate to worthwhile causes, gigantic tech companies should spend rounding-error money on good digital causes like this.

[wmf]

But there do seem to be quite a few people at Google already working on random stuff that won't get them promoted.

[digi_owl]

What seems to have happened was that Google shifted focus from sorting the web to delivering the "zeitgeist" of the present.

Perhaps because more people were likely to search for whatever was on the news cycle than some arbitrary piece of info.

Never mind that Google's earnings comes from ads, not search results.

[ghaff]

Google's original mission statement from 1998 was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Things like Usenet archives are clearly part of that.

That is still apparently their mission statement but I agree the reality seems more along the lines of "deliver the best search results for users' immediate needs" [while making as much money from that as humanly possible]

[macspoofing]

It's sad. The original mission implied nothing was going to get lost and abandoned. So much for that.

[macspoofing]

Somebody (and most likely a team of somebodies) needs to own it. If nobody at the top is willing to champion the project and carve out a budget and people, then they need to fold it.

[giancarlostoro]

I wish Google would donate those logs to archive.org and maybe even some servers. Idk why some of these tech giants never donate to projects that care about the internet the very thing which drives their profits.

[naasking]

Google search in general has become less effective, so perhaps it simply carried over.

[mmanfrin]

Search is abysmal these days. I'll look for a term with 3 words and it almost always throws out one word, giving me useless results.

[nikanj]

”You searched for Stockholm Syndrome Research. Here’s a bunch of Stockholm travel blogs! They’re just missing two of your keywords, but they’re really popular with other visitors”

[IAmEveryone]

I just did this search, and at least the first page only had results perfectly matching the query.

Try yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=Stockholm+Syndrome+Research

[mirimir]

Same for me.

But then, no Google account or cookies for me, so ...

[ccozan]

I think is possible to have the verbatim option active all the time, but I don't remember how.

[forgotmypw]

Disclaimer: I have not tested these add-ons myself.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

[pasbesoin]

And the people who simply accept this have...

[smoyer]

... gone to Sweden on vacation.

More seriously, I think a better analogy is putting a frog in cold water and turning on the stove's burner. Things are much worse but because it happened so slowly, we simply have a "new normal". The change from one day to the next on this time-scale is undiscernable.

[xvf22]

Quotes still force the word to be included don't they? Though I suppose that still doesn't do much if the algorithm has tossed out the matches you want.

[JoshMnem]

Google Groups was always terrible. It almost immediately started ruining Usenet.