Web Search Garage

Searching Usenet

What is Usenet? Usenet is a set of discussion groups, organized into a hierarchy. Instead of the discussion groups being distributed by e-mail, they're either hosted by news servers (which will require that you have special news readers to read the discussion groups) or maintained on Web sites.

There are various places all over the Web that host mailing lists; your ISP, in fact, may have a news server. But for the purpose of this book, we're going to focus on Google Groups.

Google Groups is a Web-based archive of Usenet that goes back over twenty years and contains tens of millions of messages. Its search, as you might expect, is extremely thorough; you can do some serious searching using Google Groups. But before we get into ...