Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

Michael Czeiszperger <czei AT webperformanceinc.com> wrote:
> 
> Now that DejaNews has been purchased, the new owners, Google,
> have done away with almost all of the features. One feature I used all of
> the time was a weekly search for postings containing certain keywords
> that would send the search results to me automatically. The new
> USENET feature of Google allows for a search of the USENET archives,
> but its only manual. Does anyone know of a DejaNews competitor that
> might have this feature?

I asked Lane Becker about this, as he used to work at Deja, and here's
what he had to say.

----- Forwarded message from Lane Becker <lane AT monstro.com> -----

Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 12:53:42 -0500
Subject: Re: [internetworkers] USENET search & report?
From: Lane Becker <lane AT monstro.com>
To: Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>

> Any ideas? See below. I'm curious as to whether anyone has taken the
> Deja ball and started running with it or not.

Actually, this particular feature was one of the few things that I worked on
that I felt like came out of that company unmolested (from a technology
standpoint, anyway -- the interface was so crammed with crap that it
definitely left something to be desired.)  But it worked, which is more than
I can say for most of the stuff that they released from 99 on.

(Ok, that's not entirely fair -- they've done wonders over at Half.com,
after all.)

Google trashed all the Deja code, though, when the bought the archives, and
I don't think they have any plans to implement anything beyond the basic
search and post functionality that's they've got in there now.  And I can't
imagine anyone else sees any sort of value in doing anything with Usenet,
these days.  Though looking at Google's advanced search page, I imagine one
could build a Google scrape-and-send feature along these lines -- the format
of their results appears to be pretty stable, although it would require a
lot of parsing.

For the record, Deja had a number of nifty email features that they never
released to the public -- in early 98 they purchased a small Australian
eGroups-esque mailing list service called "Virtually Perfect," which was
basically these two guys, Grant and Hamish, who went on to code all sorts of
Usenet-related stuff.  They had basically perfected a Usenet-to-email
gateway setup, with all sorts of nifty features, including excellent spam
filtering.  But the only thing that was ever released to the site was the
emailed-search feature and also a send-daily/weekly/monthly list of
subjects, and both of those were pretty well-buried.

l

-- 
lane becker: lane AT monstro.com
Needs updating: http://monstro.com/
Fun fun work work: http://adaptivepath.com/


----- End forwarded message -----

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