[Info-vax] Usenet searching

[Jojimbo]

On Jan 3, 5:15 pm, moro... at world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney)
wrote:
> JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> writes:
> >Jojimbo wrote:
> >> Ever wonder why searching comp.os.vms with google doesn't work very
> >> well?  
> >I've often searched for posts that I had made and google couldn't find
> >them. At first, I think it was just me not entering text properly. But
> >doing the same search on "web" yielded my posts via some web sites that
> >had recorded comp.os.vms.
> >(For instance, if you recall ap post where the right syntax for doing X
> >was documented, you want to look for it, but google groups no longer
> >finds it.)
> >What I find odd is that this used to work so well. Why was it broken ?
>
> Google has never gotten Usenet to work well for some reason.  I know that
> perhaps some was due to their purchasing Usenet archives from Dejanews,
> but that was so long ago they should have gotten things going long ago.
>
> It seems weird that they have trouble indexing Usenet, they index the web
> so well.

I wonder if when the bought the data from Deja they screwed up the
loading into the google databases so that indexing is impossible.
Maybe the message you see about date sorting being approximate in a
search is a clue.  I am happy to hear google admit to some problems,
it was frustrating to not find things I knew were there.