On Nov 2, 8:11*pm, Martin Brown
wrote:
On 02/11/2011 17:39, wrote:

In ,
Martin *wrote:

Any reasonable individual would be well advised to use Google groups to
search through historic Usenet postings on a given topic.

Perhaps I know too much to be reasonable. *I used to use it, quite
a lot, but gave up when it became so unreliable that other approaches
were several times less effort. *Every now and then, I recheck, and
it is no better. *Of course, I am looking for posts that I know were
made, but quite a lot time ago, and I am pretty sure that it indexes
only a small proportion of older ones.

I am inclined to agree. If you have access to a news server with a very
deep memory and an alternative search index. Are any of the searchable
alternatives that you use publicly available outside academia?

Google groups no longer finds some of the very old posts that I know I
have made using ordinary search terms. Their indexing is badly screwed
up and they faithfully archive all the Chinese fake brandname goods spam
that they inject into Usenet for good measure.

But for moderately recent threads it does seem to more or less work.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

The problems I find are that sometimes it'svery slow compared with a
newsreader and a few times it's completely packed in altogether.
Oh,and it rations your number of posts.