arnold(a)skeeve.com writes: They are also on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/utzoo-wiseman-usenet-archive -- Leah Neukirchen <leah(a)vuxu.org> https://leahneukirchen.org/

On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 15:19, Justin R. Andrusk <jra(a)andrusk.com> wrote: Has anyone definitely proven that any of the contents of these files are not in the searchable Google Groups interface? I don't really see any need to duplicate their efforts. I am 100% certain that Google got Deja News's entire archive and 99% certain that it was fairly quickly supplemented with the University of Toronto material provided by Henry Spencer. Certainly the headers in a thread like this would seem to indicate that the material all came from utzoo: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/net.unix-wizards/krbEHGQ95_o/QaV2LNSe… (see "show original" for any message in the dropdown box in the upper right hand corner by the date). While Google has not shown a tremendous deal of interest in Groups over the years - notably, the search was very lacking/incomplete at various points - I would think that there is now enough acknowledgement of the historical importance of these messages that Google would at the very least do their best to preserve what they have. I would also imagine that if someone else had approached them with a substantial enough private archive that they would have accepted it, and not necessarily done a huge press release depending on the time frame, but that's pure supposition on my part. It would be fascinating to look through messages from before 1995 (when Deja News started archiving) to see if any clues can be unearthed about message sources other than utzoo. As somewhat of an aside, my father was the head sysadmin at Deja News at the time of their purchase by Google and I may have recounted this story before but it's worth sharing again. Google's entire purchase of Deja News involved a couple of Google engineers flying to Austin with a large disk array, letting it mirror over a weekend, and then flying back to California. Google did not, as far as I recall, take possession of any physical assets whatsoever. -Henry

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 01:06:45PM -0800, Kurt H Maier wrote: Amen.

On Sat, Nov 23, 2019 at 01:48:07AM +0000, Jason Stevens wrote: I agree even though it is self serving. I'm the guy that posted something on soc.singles and disappeared off usenet for three months (was installing Unix on a supercomputer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, no UUCP, no Usenet). I came back and people were *still* arguing about what I said. Huh. I don't really care for me at this point, but I'd love for my kids to learn about me through all those posts. soc.singles was a distraction, comp.arch, comp.unix-wizards, there is a pretty big window into who I am in those posts. I've been reading 30-35 year old posts I made, and while I'm ashamed of how cocky I was, there was some substance there. So I'd love an interface like dejanews had. You could limit to a set of groups (I don't remember how you did that but it was a thing) and you could limit it over a date range, and of course you could search by string. I think there was more ways to tailor the search. If I can offer up some help getting this back, let me know. --lm

On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 16:06, Kurt H Maier <khm(a)sciops.net> wrote: Why do you say that? I used a browser that was fully logged out of Google and in paranoid/private settings mode and I could browse newsgroups, do basic searching, etc. eg: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/net.unix-wizards/iris%7Csort:date I alluded to this sort of problem in my previous email, but in my recent experience the search results have been satisfactory and I consider the degraded search problem resolved. I have been able to search for very precise text strings with entirely satisfactory results over the last few months. -Henry

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 04:00:34PM -0800, Kurt H Maier wrote: All I can say is that's not my experience. I just dropped the above link into an incognito browser window (so no cookies, logins, etc.), and I was able to click on any of those links and read them. Cheers, - Ted

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 06:21:49PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote: Yes, that's how the clustering works with Elasticsearch. You setup multiple nodes that are part of a cluster and data is replicated across all of them. If one goes down, you don't lose any data as the others will reconstitute the data. Going to look at adding the Usenet data to a Graylog instance as that uses Elasticsearch as a backend and the front end UI is already there to give you a GUI for searching and doing analytics on what you send to it. Justin