[desiarnezjr]

Google in many ways helped sink USENET by acquiring Dejanews, then slowly replacing the USENET functionality with Google News. Dejanews, in hindsight could have been a pretty reasonable proto-social network on its own.

Not that I'm bitter...

[EricE]

It's not an accident they sunk it :(

[desiarnezjr]

Nope. :(

To add some context to those not from that era. Dejanews was the only practical way to search USENET at all, so it was effectively a USENET search engine with a crude web client. It was pretty darned crude, but was also much easier than the many NNTP clients. Most people I knew used both pretty effectively as USENET grew.

It was simple and functional, only to be slowly eroded by Google News.

Have no idea where Google News is now. But Dejanews was in many ways a Reddit for that era.

[giantrobot]

To expand on Dejanews' search (for the uninitiated), Usenet servers had limited retention. That was the length of time they'd keep a message on the server before deleting it. If I sent out a message a few months ago and you just checked the server today, it's entirely possible you'd never see my message. You might see more recent replies to my original message but your server might not have my old original message.

Because every Usenet server carried copies of messages each one determined its retention time based on the amount of storage the machine had.

Dejanews imported a bunch of old Usenet archives and ran their own servers which subscribed to everything and indexed it all. They were to Usenet what Google was to the web.

[secabeen]

Still there, if you get your search terms right:

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.drwho/search?q=before%3...