What was DejaNews?
The question is what is DejaNews, but the question really is what was DejaNews. DejaNews began as a site that was dedicated to searching and participating in discussion groups found on Usenet. It later changed its name to Deja.com. This change was due in part to the change of focus from general Usenet searching and discussions to consumer product reviews. With this change they also added an area with information on products, such as product descriptions.
What happened to DejaNews?
The consumer review section of Deja.com was later to be sold. It ended up being sold to eBay’s Half.com. This followed a series of layoffs at the company. After the sale of the consumer review section of Deja.com and some more layoffs, they were bought out completely by the number one search engine Google.
By acquiring Deja.com, Google gets their Usenet search technology. They also acquired the Usenet archive, the Deja.com trademarks, the code and operating systems that operate the Usenet service, and other intellectual property. The archive obtained by Google contained nearly 500 million articles.
If you are still looking for quality access to Usenet, the best place to go is FastUsenet.org. They offer 2 million new articles daily, as well as a wide variety of specialized content servers.
Google Usenet Archive
Whenever you are looking for a certain topic in Usenet and don’t know where to find it, the Google archive is a good place to look. Google archives all of the messages that they receive so that when you search for something in a newsgroup you can select the groups’ page on Google and it will show you the article or articles that the subject can be found in. The Google archive is a great tool that every Fast Usenet member should make use of.
The archives in Google are very large, probably several servers to hold all of the information. The messages posted there are only text, but Fast Usenet alone receives and sends over 2 million articles day. So you can only imagine how much information needs to be stored to keep a good archive. The Google archive also needs space so it can have some level of retention, meaning the amount of time that messages can be searched back to. Some articles can be even found to date back to a couple of years ago, and that is some serious storage.
So next time you want to find a subject and don’t know where to begin looking, why not try the Google Archive at www.google.com >> Groups. Then type in your search words into the search field. Google will then search an extensive archive and should return some great matches for your subject.