Google Groups

Google Groups is a run by Google Inc. Website that allows you to search specific internet forums and use. Also own forums ( " groups " ) can be established. They can be used either via a web interface as well as by e -mail or through an RSS feed.

There is a main page, which essentially consists of a command line for search terms, as well as a search for the advanced. This allows for the restriction of the search to authors, periods, languages ​​, groups, and other criteria.

History

Usenet Archive

The U.S. company Google Inc. bought in 2001, the data holdings of the insolvent operator company of the Usenet archive at Deja News. This was about half a billion items.

Google itself had by this time collected Usenet articles and collected by private individuals and from CD accessories collections. In February 2001, we presented the combined amount of data available.

After Altavista Remarq and have given similar services, Google Groups remains the only publicly accessible Usenet archive with the aim to make the most text - searchable newsgroups.

Google Groups can be used to read articles in certain groups, including a thread - view and an RSS feed. If you invest a free user account, you can also write articles yourself. Both reading and writing but there are limitations compared with newsreaders.

My Google Groups

Google Groups 2004 has been expanded so that in addition to reading and writing articles to newsgroups also new discussion forums can be set up. These are limited to Google Groups web forums and have no relation to the Usenet. In addition, since mailing lists can be set up, similar to the competitor Yahoo Groups. One private Google Group you can now join only with Google account. The Add Recipients were generally removed.

Google Groups today

These two parts of Google Groups continue to exist, but the service has been increasingly less integrated into the other offerings from Google. For example, no more hits from Google Groups are displayed in the general Web search by Google now. For this purpose, must be selected from the navigation bar in the general Web search to the sub menu " discussions ". On the other hand, the index of Google Groups has been extended to general Forums - at the expense of Usenet, which is currently hardly any evidence, apart from the direct and selective browsing of newsgroups. Incidentally, Google Groups is rather in the shadow of the other popular services, and is significantly less attention in the press.

Privacy

Unlike most news servers, articles in the archive Google Groups are kept indefinitely. Therefore, the statements of the authors are permanently discoverable on Google Groups and linked to their name. Especially for regular writing authors can be as simple a more or less meaningful Personality Profile. Google also automatically created by each participant in groups a profile that can be retrieved. This also applies to newsgroups, so also for users who have not set up an account with Google and post a news reader and a news server to Usenet. The data from Google Groups can be read out and reproduced on the internet of other services (eg Yasni ), resulting in increasingly frequent criticism.

Google Groups service 's predecessor Deja News had therefore provided two ways to exclude own posts from the archive: On the one can specify the so-called nuking lists of message ID values ​​of the removed item. On the other hand, one can in the article even ask about the header line X - No-Archive not to include an article in archives. Google Groups support both approaches. This information will not be considered in the preparation of the above mentioned profile. Here, Google created a full posting statistics that is permanently available, even after the fact for a period of several years, broken down by contributions per month. The retrieval is done via the " Profile " next to the name of the user in the thread view.