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Using Google Groups to search for archived articles isn't
what it used to be. For whatever reasons, it's become too
unpredictable. It's been easy enough to locate an article
by message ID, but the more complex the search parameters
one employs, the more inexplicably incomplete the results.
For example, try searching for known exact phrases in the
Advanced Search window, three, four, five words in length,
entered exactly as it appears in an article you know to be
archived. I've tried this with many articles, both old and
new, not only my own articles, but those of others, friend
and foe alike whose complete articles, message headers and
all, I had saved locally when they were originally posted,
some dating back to January of 1998, when I first started
reading and posting to usenet newsgroups. I can still pull
up any of those articles by message ID, simply by copying
the article's message ID, pasting it after the equal sign
in the following link, then opening the link in a browser:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=
E.g., in honour of the late great author Arthur C. Clarke:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=cec7dca60a7e8395af952dbc89261fe9@[EMAIL
PROTECTED]
I find that by entering only two words in the exact phrase
field, or else within quotes, or optionally separated by a
hyphen between each word, it finds this article no problem:
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=%22scorpion+descendant
But try searching for any three word phrase within the same
do***ent, and you get "did not match any do***ents", to wit:
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?lr=&safe=off&num=10&q=on-scorpion-descendant
I noticed this when my own website's link to Google Groups
(which is, or rather has been, convenient for searching my
own articles at the click of a mouse, to confirm that they
have been posted and archived), went south for no apparent
reason beginning one year ago in June of 2007, and they've
been that way ever since. More recently, I discovered that
by reducing the exact phrase down to two words, and adding
the word "PGP" to the "with all of the words" field, about
22,000 articles magically (re)appear in the search results,
but with unaccounted for gaps ranging from months to years:
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=PGP&num=100&scoring=d&as_epq=Daniel+Joseph
Even so, I can retrieve even the missing "gapped" articles
by message ID, but not by using this generic search method.
Google might correct this search defect, but until they do...
I also tried the same search on the main Google web-search
engine, with mixed results, similar numbers, ~ 20,000 hits,
but no way to sort by date, and lots of extraneous results,
making this process of searching Google Groups impractical:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=PGP&as_epq=Daniel+Joseph&num=100
The older searches of only a year ago would typically yield
over 30,000 hits on my full name, Daniel Joseph Min on both
Google Groups and Google Web searches. Based on experiments,
I've found the same to be true for other multi-word phrases,
that is more numerous hits a year or so ago, than it is now.
If your experience with using Google Groups search features
is like mine, you'll find that most if not all articles can
be retrieved by message ID, but not by complex/exact phrase
search criteria. Based on past experience with Google, I've
every confidence they'll eventually remedy this incongruity,
but how soon, or if they even have the luxury of time, time
will tell. This world is entering a very unstable condition,
namely economically, politically, socially, environmentally,
apocalyptically, you name it-lly! 2012 AD is 4.5 years away
at this writing. Meanwhile, as long as the Internet remains
widely, publicly available, I'll continue posting to usenet
newsgroups. But it doesn't look like that's gonna last long.
Armageddon Cometh,
Daniel Joseph Min
http://www.angelfire.com/moon2/danieljosephmin/
--
I do not subscribe to usenet newsgroups. Reply
via email, <mailto:danieljosephmin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
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