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New Google Groups in Beta 341

Posted by CowboyNeal from the new-look-for-old-news dept.
qwe writes "Google has apparently launched a new version of their Google Groups, currently in beta. It looks a lot like Gmail. One can attach a star to message threads. One can even create new groups, although they aren't actual Usenet groups."
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New Google Groups in Beta More

New Google Groups in Beta

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  • Great (Score:4, Funny)

    by jm92956n ( 758515 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:01PM (#9649269) Journal
    Now I can start alt.slashdot.first-post

    • Bah. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jhesse ( 138516 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:30PM (#9649444) Homepage
      I can make a *real* newsgroup. Ph33R M3!

      (It's not rocket science. You just have to know the right codes to put in a newsgroup post.)
    • How odd that I noticed this earlier in the day. Slashdot is slower than my own curiosity these days. For Shame.

      I had personally sent an email a few weeks back suggesting they merge gmail with groups to some extent. Bring back the glory days of dejanews.

      In fact, what is google missing nowadays when it comes to search?

      A telephone name and reverse lookup type system would be nice. yahoo has one of those I think, but it sucks. I'm sure if google were to provide one it would be fairly straightforward

      It

      • Re:Great. Whats next? (Score:5, Informative)

        by elb ( 49623 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:46PM (#9649525)
        A telephone name and reverse lookup type system would be nice. yahoo has one of those I think, but it sucks. I'm sure if google were to provide one it would be fairly straightforward. It'd be nice if google also provided babelfish.altavista.com type services.

        you mean like this [google.com] or like this [google.com]?

        or perhaps a translation tool [google.com]?

        try these too. [google.com]

      • Re:Great. Whats next? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It'd be nice if google also provided babelfish.altavista.com type services. too bad google cant just buy altavista.
        Yeah, that would be really useful. [google.com]

    • This story is a dupe (Score:5, Informative)

      by theskeptic ( 699213 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:02AM (#9649598) Journal
      May 13 [slashdot.org].

      Anyways, I have tested a few google groups, its an odd combination of usenet and yahoo groups. Not planning on doing much with them unless google adds more features.

  • Gmail (Score:5, Informative)

    by chamblah ( 774997 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:02PM (#9649270)
    And if you have a Gmail account you already have a login for the Google groups.

    • Re:Gmail (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:04PM (#9649283)
      Actually if you have any google account you can loginto this.

      You can sign up for it at https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount?service =groups2&continue=http://groups-beta.google.co m/ [google.com]

    • Re:Gmail (Score:3, Insightful)

      by britneys 9th husband ( 741556 )
      Wouldn't this give your email address to spammers? Gmail's spam filtering is nice and all, but I'd rather just not get the junk in the first place.

      I know, I know, just set up 2 different gmail accounts, but I don't want to pay another $20 on Ebay just to be able to post to Usenet without being spammed.

      • Re:Gmail (Score:3, Interesting)

        by JWSmythe ( 446288 )

        Actually, Gmail's spam filtering isn't all that great. I've been forwarding all my regular account's mail to my gmail account, and it misses about 3:10 messages that my mail server catches with SpamAssassin and SpamCop as the only blacklist. But hey, it's better than the other free services.

        • I've been forwarding all my regular account's mail to my gmail account, and it misses about 3:10 messages

          Unfair comparison, though... Sure, for the really blatant spam, they'll catch it by content alone. But for the more subtle crap, they have a lot better chance of noticing "100k messages coming from an apparently open relay that doesn't host any known mailing lists" than "JWS sent himself another really odd message".

          But, I don't really think Google needs an effective filter, anyway. They don't have

        • Re:Gmail (Score:3, Informative)

          by darkmeridian ( 119044 )

          Actually, Gmail's spam filtering isn't all that great. I've been forwarding all my regular account's mail to my gmail account, and it misses about 3:10 messages that my mail server catches with SpamAssassin and SpamCop as the only blacklist. But hey, it's better than the other free services.

          Jesus, people, can you hear yourselves speak? Of course the spam filtering is going to suck when you FORWARD the mail to gmail from YOUR E-MAIL ACCOUNT. The headers and such will be the same as many non-spam messages

    • Re:Gmail (Score:5, Informative)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:54PM (#9649561)
      And if you have a Gmail account you already have a login for the Google groups.

      Not a great idea. When registering to post to Usenet using Google Groups you must use a working email address to get the confirmation. And when you post that same address is posted along with your messages; you have no option even to obfuscate it. So within two days that account is jammed with spam and viruses. Fortunately I used a throwaway account to do that. No matter how effective the spam filtering, why expose a real address in the place that is guaranteed to get you tons of spam?

      • Re:Gmail (Score:5, Funny)

        by MrWa ( 144753 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:31AM (#9649717) Homepage
        Well, if you use your GMail account to sign up for Google Groups, their highly touted and tested spam filtering should auto-magically make that spam disappear! And with 1gig of storage, tons of spam should be no worry!

        Come one, come all! Sign up for the new Googleweb now! Email! News! Shopping! Message boards! You can do it all at your non-portal, non-access provider, lean, mean, searching machine, website! No need to go anywhere else - we've got it all here! (some delay while our cache is updated.)

      • Re:Gmail (Score:5, Informative)

        by kinema ( 630983 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:49AM (#9649773)
        Actually I post to Usenet all the time via Google Groups with out any address obfuscation and I have yet to have any spam slip the Gmail's filters.

  • This is great because it's Google (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Real Troll Talk ( 793436 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:02PM (#9649273) Journal
    Nothing was greater than when Google bought out Delphi and took over the largest USENET archive of all-time.

    Google always does things the right way without ruining the user experience or their wallets.

    In Google We Trust...

    (P.S. I have three Gmail invites anyone up for one -- I already gave away 5 to friends/family?)

    • Re:This is great because it's Google (Score:5, Informative)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:16PM (#9649363)
      That wasn't Delphi that Google bought... it was Deja (formerly known as DejaNews) who they aquired.

    • Re:This is great because it's Google (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 1u3hr ( 530656 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:03AM (#9649605)
      Nothing was greater than when Google bought out Delphi and took over the largest USENET archive of all-time. Google always does things the right way without ruining the user experience or their wallets.

      Actually, the original dejanews was better (before they got desperate and tried to become a portal). They respected the referrers headers and had largely correct threading. Google lumps all posts together with the same "Subject:" header, even if they're years apart. Also deja wouldn't let you respond to an old message (a month, I think), whereas I often see people who've obviously found a post with a Google search and responded to it, not noticing that it's a few years old.

      Also, Google has picked up some groups on servers like Adobe.com and presents them as if they were normal newsgroups. However, they're not, and though Google lets you make a post to them, no one will answwer becasue they only see those posted via Adobe.

      I'm not really happy that Google is blending their own groups with Usenet. Too many already can't tell the difference between web forums and Usenet.

    • WOOAH-THERE - READ THIS FIRST (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RMH101 ( 636144 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @05:21AM (#9650486)
      what's this "Create new Google Group" option? It's not going to automatically put in the RFC: it's going to CREATE A GULF BETWEEN USENET AND GOOGLE GROUPS. at the moment, GG is a nice interface to Usenet for web users.

      It is now going to be a competitor. Read that again until you get it - this is a BIG, BIG change.

  • Old news... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sH4RD ( 749216 )
    I read about this a couple weeks ago. What took it so long to appear on Slashdot? (maybe I should have submitted it :P) Anyhow, an improvement over Google Groups, but I almost LIKE the older, lighter version.

  • Promising yet limited... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chrispyman ( 710460 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:04PM (#9649284)
    While the idea of a GMailish like system for newsgroups is a good thing, the whole thing seems limited by the fact that new groups can only be viewed using Google Groups, which gives them less readership.

    • Re:Promising yet limited... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:06PM (#9649297)
      On the other hand, Google seems to be in the business of only getting into things they can be #1 at doing.... it's quite possible that Google Groups will become the most read of such discussion sites after this goes live.

      Besides, I'm sure all of these Groups will be completely included in Google's index, while Yahoo! Groups and Delphi Forums and other such sites are not because they usually require a signon to see most of the content.

      • Re:Promising yet limited... (Score:5, Informative)

        by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:35PM (#9649469) Homepage
        You do know that "Google Groups" is actually just a front end for USENET, and that USENET predates Google.com by about 15 years?
      • I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off. Rumors have abounded for years that usenet was going to just fade away (of course it hasn't) because people didn't like the old-school ways of accessing it.

        Plus, there's always the fact that since it's google, you can bet everything in it will be very quickly searchable...
        • ...and to extend my last thought, there's no telling what other things a system like this might open up for google. Imagine they have their own usenet-like groups system and it pretty much usurps usenet. Since they will have total, high-speed access to all of it all the time, so they could conceivably eventually make an ask-jeeves type query system for it. It could grep questions and answers and make probably really supply useful information on just about any subject in which there had been a lot of disc
        • I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off. Rumors have abounded for years that usenet was going to just fade away (of course it hasn't) because people didn't like the old-school ways of accessing it.

          Unless they allow massive binaries, they're not going to replace real Usenet. And as most Usenet binaries are porn or warez, it seems unlikely Google will.

          • Re:Promising yet limited... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Scarblac ( 122480 ) <slashdot@gerlich.nl> on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:12AM (#9650696) Homepage

            Unless they allow massive binaries, they're not going to replace real Usenet.

            Fuck binaries, binares aren't the real Usenet. They're what's killing the real Usenet. On a technical level, Usenet is totally unsuitable for massive binaries, and it's getting harder and harder to make it do its actual job (letting people send text messages to newsgroups and contact other people). Fuck binaries.

            Much the same holds for IRC and its warez kiddies.

        • Re:Promising yet limited... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by CaptainTux ( 658655 ) <papillion@gmail.com> on Friday July 09, 2004 @04:39AM (#9650368) Homepage Journal
          I wouldn't rule out the idea that google is trying to become the "new" usenet here, and I actually believe they could pull it off.

          As a supporting example, I know at least 30-40 people who have told me "Oh, I read this thing on Google Groups" to which I sometimes replied "Yeah, Usenet can be great" and their response is "What is Usenet? This was on Google!"

          Google is doing to Usenet what MS has done to the whole OS concept for a lot of people. Many people don't even realize there *are* other operating systems aside from MS Windows. In this case, many people don't realize there is a seperation between Google and Usenet. They don't understand that all Google does is provide an interface to a *much* older network that has been around since before many of them were even born. *That* my friends is strong branding. Google might not be muddying the waters on purpose but it's still pretty scary isn't it?

    • Re:Promising yet limited... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:42PM (#9649497) Journal
      Indeed. Imagine if microsoft did the same thing, slashdot would be teeming with irate geeks yelling about them trying to "embrace and extend" USENET. I know Google has a "do no evil" dictum, but I'm hesitant to put much faith in the goodwill of any corporation.
      • Imagine if microsoft did the same thing, slashdot would be teeming with irate geeks yelling about them trying to "embrace and extend"
        So you would trust a convicted murderer to babysit your children as much as someone with no bad record?

        Of course your answer is yes going by your logic. Otherwise you must be an irate geek!
      • Yeah, that dictum should hold OK until right about the time they finally go public. Then it's shareholders, shareholders, shareholders.
    • In other words, google takes a step towards the darkside with a proprietary and closed psuedo-usenet. If MS was doing this, everyone here would be screaming for vengence.

      Keep your eye on google, they have the potential to do a lot of wrong.
      • Oh FFS, anyone could toddle off to Yahoo Groups to create their "closed and proprietry" discussions instead.

        Google provide a fantastic service and doesn't charge the majority of users a penny.

        Jesus, what does it take to please you people?

  • Single Signon... coming soon to Google. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:04PM (#9649287)
    How many Google Accounts does one need? Google presently maintains unrelated signons for...

    - Google AdWords (to buy ads with Google)
    - Google AdSense (for webmasters who want to show Google's ads)
    - Google Answers (their rather obscure paid researcher solution)
    - Free SiteSearch (for webmasters who want a custom colorset when users use a Google box on their site)
    - Google API (for programmers who want to use Google via SOAP)
    - GMail (the hot webmail beta test)
    - Google Groups Beta (the new service we're talking about)
    - Blogger (the blog site they aquired)

    Yahoo and MSN/Passort of course have the privacy implications of there being a single-signon accross a wide network of websites some of which are operated by partner companies... but Google is developing the reverse problem. As you move from one service of Google to another, and the user may very well have different passwords at each of the logon points. Very confusing, and an annoyance to users.

    The good news is that Google appears to be in the process of merging these databases for the free services and an account created today for one free services now gets access to all of them except GMail. They are showing signs that they intend on getting AdWords and AdSense into that system as well. Hopefully we'll just need one google.com cookie to get everything Google has soon...

  • Google is losing its main draw: SIMPLICITY. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Qweezle ( 681365 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:07PM (#9649302) Journal
    As Google keeps expanding, they are looking more and more like a simplified Yahoo!.

    Will Google put people off by losing the one thing that made them extremely individual in the big wide world of web search engines/portals?

    • Re:Google is losing its main draw: SIMPLICITY. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:11PM (#9649331)
      Google's Search interface hasn't changed at all. If you don't want a free e-mail account from them, they don't force one on you... in fact they've taken the opposite tact of baring the doors so that some people who want in can't get into that right now.

      This makes perfect sense from a business perspective. They're expanding into becoming a full-service portal, but making search the main focus throughout all of their offerings.
    • Hmm.

      I type "www.google.com"

      The main page still fits in a 640x480 screen (if I were crazy enough to use such a display). The central focus of the screen is the search bar.

      The result of all this high-profile rapid expansion is..... a thin line of tiny plain-text links above the search bar.

      Yeah, I can see how that's complicated and confusing.

    • Re:Google is losing its main draw: SIMPLICITY. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:24PM (#9649407)
      Actually, it seems to me that they're still focusing on doing just one thing, well: search. Just because they're searching email and discussion boards now doesn't really change that.

      Not quite sure how blogger fits in, unless they come up with a particularly cool way to index and search blogs.

    • Re:Google is losing its main draw: SIMPLICITY. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SoupIsGoodFood_42 ( 521389 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:28PM (#9649431)
      You mean google is deviating from it's core? That being search technology?

      I don't think so. All of Google's spin-offs use search technology as a key part of the product.

      Yahoo! was a portal that grew to do pretty much everything unrealted to what a portal does. They deviated from their core idea.

    • NO, because they just keep making their search technology more adaptive, letting it evolve and be more efficient when it sorts various things (webpages, email, usenet archives, news articles)... The different situations gives Google the ability to have a ongoing test of their algorithms in various situations with various goals... and they can tweak accordingly... Besides, if Microsoft wants to start competing with Google, Google will required more than a textfield and a results page to their profile...

      I th

  • Beta test it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by cuban321 ( 644777 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:07PM (#9649303) Homepage
    Beta test it?

    "Server Error
    The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

    Please try again in 30 seconds."

    Well, I did my part!
    • I got that too! did we just... SLASHDOT GOOGLE!? *whipes a tear from his eye* this is a proud day at slashdot! I think everyone deserves a pat on the back

  • Eh.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bmantz65 ( 642864 )
    Maybe it'll take time to get used to, but I don't really care for it. Reminds me of Yahoo Groups and the Usenet subjects' font are too big, thus not a lot of subjects displayed on the default view.
  • It's a Shame that

    Server Error
    The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
    Please try again in 30 seconds.

    Keep on occuring

  • This is old... (Score:4, Informative)

    by after ( 669640 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:11PM (#9649326) Journal
    ... very old.

    http://labs.google.com, check it out. The Google groups Bata have been oublic for a while now.
  • Where is "Sort by Date"?

  • embrace and extend anyone? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:17PM (#9649366)
    Google is pulling a microsoft by embracing and extending Usenet.

    Once you go public you gotta turn evil, it's the law.

    No seriously, they can be sued by shareholders if they don't do it!

    Capitalism is teh...you decide.

  • Google, Deja, and thread continuity (Score:5, Informative)

    by jwlidtnet ( 453355 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:19PM (#9649374)
    I've generally been pretty satisfied with Google's treatment of the old Dejanews archive. Dejanews was *great* while it existed. You didn't have to be "registered" to post to USEnet in the early stages of its existence, the "author profile" feature was always really fun, and it featured well-thought-out article tracking and thread handling. Deja.com was something else entirely (one of the strangest company metamorphosis ever, really) yet the few months post-Deja and pre-Google were really nightmarish--I didn't realize what a resource Usenet archives could be until they weren't around.

    Google's first version of "Groups" was very bare-bones, yet while its innovations were sound--in particular, Google's search function was far superior, and its extended-to-early-1980s-archive was a delight--it dropped several features that made Dejanews so much fun. And while Google insisted that it was going to gradually revamp its Groups UI, it never really did so.

    Google's big holdout (and one which they apparently were originally intending to fix back in Groups' early days) was its inefficient sorting system. Groups has a quirk/bug that Deja managed to avoid: simply put, threads with like-titles are "merged together" in the "view thread" interface, despite not necessarily having anything to do with each other. Say you're searching for information, and it comes up in a thread called "The Beatles on tape." You click on the "View thread" button. In the left pane will be a huge list of responses. But most will likely not be related to the discussion at hand, as Google throws all threads ever titled "The Beatles on tape" into that list. Deja would intelligently organize by article ID, generally preventing that sort of thing from happening, but Google never bothered to fix that design quirk despite promises to the contrary.

    From the look of the new Groups, it appears as if Google's trying to create an odd synthesis between Yahoo Groups and Usenet. I certainly hope they don't forget that providing a well-thought-out Usenet interface should be priority #1, with Yahoo-esque bells-and-whistles as a secondary concern.
    • Groups has a quirk/bug that Deja managed to avoid: simply put, threads with like-titles are "merged together" in the "view thread" interface, despite not necessarily having anything to do with each other.
      Doing it by title alone would be treacherous... but then people quote each other and threads tend to be clustered around in time. That should be a relatively straightforward task.
    • I have generally been very unsatisfied with Google's treatment of the old DejaNews. As you mention, their threading is pretty weak. And they have none of the "MyDeja" (or whatever it was called) features, such as thread tracking/bookmarking, etc. There is no way to say "I want to watch this thread" (other than bookmarking it yourself). It's been so long since Deja's been gone that I don't remember all the features, but I remember the Google change as rather jarring.

      Of course, neither Google nor Deja p

    • I seem to remember that Deja New's interface was frustratingly sluggish, yet it was a better interface to use than groups.google.com. This new thing from Google just doesn't work for me. It's too verbose. Then again, perhaps that's because I'm used to a real NNTP client that only display headers until I want to look furhter. There doesn't appear to be an option with this new interface to get rid of the message bodies and just show headers... although really, I would like to see a threaded view of header
  • White supremacy is #1
    Nazi is #2 .....Isn't that what I was talking about er: Wiki when I said anyone can game the system to make anything you want a 'fact'?

  • Old one was better... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:20PM (#9649384)
    Anyone notice how the new Google Groups munges email addresses and message-ids with random amounts of underscores and letter deletions on a per-post basis? This does nothing to deter spam harvesters, but it does make the Google Groups information much less useful outside the confines of Google. No longer can one easily reconstruct a thread or author history. Archives should not damage the information they claim to preserve.

    Of course, they still haven't done anything to fix the problem of breaking threads that shouldn't be broken or reassembling threads that aren't related, other than by having the same title.

  • coming soon from Google.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by blue_adept ( 40915 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:20PM (#9649387)
    GSpot: surf and organize all your porn in convenient directories. Sort by threads, or lack thereof!

  • The Slashdot of Everything (Score:3, Funny)

    by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:23PM (#9649401)
    Add some distributed moderation and Google Groups could become the Slashdot of everything.

  • Wow.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by bigattichouse ( 527527 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:26PM (#9649416) Homepage
    Slashdotted! It seems to be having errors pretty consistently... I bet someone is regretting the HTTP-REFERRER they are seeing in the logs

  • Where'd I put that post? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LqqkOut ( 767022 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:26PM (#9649422) Journal
    One can even create new groups, although they aren't actual Usenet groups.
    Many of my troubleshooting questions start with a Google web search that doesn't answer the question, and end with informative usenet threads that were left dangling months (sometimes years) ago. It would be great to have a combined google search/usenet engine so I could easily add to the collective knowledge pool (while in turn extending the livelihood of the revered ancestors of forums and discussion groups like /.)

    Would this place too much burden on the usenet servers and open up new doors for mass abuse, or would the greater access extend the richness of usenet to provide more answers that might not be worthy enough to appear on someone's website?

  • ... nightvision GOOGLES! You know... with all this criminals recording movies on the theaters... ;)

  • Embrace and extend? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:28PM (#9649429) Homepage Journal
    From where i hear that of having the monopoly of something enables you to extend it in more directions?

    If it were Microsoft i would be very scared, but, well, is Google, with a good story of openness (i.e. google API), doing things well, and getting their virtual "monopoly" doing things well, not with vapourware or doing dirty tricks to make people not follow the competence, not even limiting people on choosing the competence.

  • Usenet (Score:5, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:31PM (#9649446) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunetly, you can't post on usent using google, unless you're willing to post your shiny new gmail address for all the world's spammers to see :(
    • actually, with Gmail's site-wide bayesian filtering, spam shouldn't be an issue, and the more you get... well, the less you get(next time around).

  • Not the first time (Score:2, Informative)

    by timealterer ( 772638 )
    Actually, Google Groups 2 was already in beta for awhile a few months ago, but then they took it down.

  • Most posters are missing the point (Score:5, Informative)

    by batkiwi ( 137781 ) on Thursday July 08, 2004 @11:52PM (#9649552)
    This is to compete with yahoo groups, and the old egroups when it existed. It's not meant to have anything to do with usenet. It lets you host an email listserv-type-thing but with a web presence too, without having to have your own server.

  • G$$gle (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lifix ( 791281 )
    With google approaching its IPO, I have little doubt that more of google's services (groups directories) and web utilities (google bar / google button) will undergo "improvements." These improvements will certainly change the services and make them more commercial. We have seen gmail, which is, as far as I am concerned, the most commercial implementation of any free e-mail service (advertising based on keywords in e-mail).

    Google has brought us a great search engine, and a great set of tools. I am a firm

  • Improved searching? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:15AM (#9649643) Homepage Journal
    I hope they improve the searching options a bit. I regularly search NANAS or NANAE (new.admin.net-abuse [google.com].sightings [google.com]/email [google.com]) for a domain I suspect of spamming. Unfortunately the period is ommited from the search strings, so a search for spammer.com also matches notaspammer.net and huntdownandflogspammers.org. I would love full regex abilities. I'd actually pay for good Google Groups access.

  • Who owns the content? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hans Lehmann ( 571625 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:19AM (#9649661)
    ...although they aren't actual Usenet groups."

    That's the part that worries me. I typed my first [google.com] Usenet post over ten years ago, shortly after getting my first internet account (yeah, I know, I was on AOL, but we were all young and stupid once.) What struck me about Usenet was the properties that I soon learned applied to the Internet as a whole: Nobody owns Usenet or its content, nobody can easily regulate or censor Usenet, and Usenet tends to find its way around any distruptions in service (since it's not all stored on one giant server.) One day DajaNews started collecting and saving Usenet posts, making them available through their web site. I found that idea disturbing, sort of like when I saw my first Canter & Segal spam. I quickly realized, however, that given enough disk space and bandwidth I too could archive all the chatter and discourse that is Usenet, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop me. Usenet discussions could theoretically be made immune to virtual book burning.

    DejaNews was eventually bought by Google, which continues to archive most of the non-binary groups, as well as provide a web-based portal to Usenet. It does not, however, have the only copy of Usenet. Other companies like Yahoo, Delphi, ( and even Slashdot) have created their own user group systems, accessable only from their servers, and viewable only with a web browser (after all, what good is the Internet if you can't put banner ads on it?) If you don't like the way that your newsreader sorts & displays, you can get a different one, or even write your own. If you don't like the spam posts that Delphi weaves among regular ones, or the spam page that they present to you before allowing you to see a group, tough sh*t. You'll read Delphi postings the way they want you to , or you won't read them at all. If Delphi goes belly up, all their archived posts could go to the highest bidder, or maybe just disappear completely.

    Google has always worn the white hats, so far. If they become as popular with these groups that "aren't actual Usenet groups." as they've gotten with their search engine, what happens if Usenet slowly dissappears when everyone jumps on the Googler bandwagon? What happens if this central database, owned by a single company, is no longer freely accessable?

    BTW, I highly recommend GigaNews [giganews.com] Usenet service. I've used them for about 5 years now; good consistant service, & they never tried to pull anything sneaky.

  • Can also use news aggregator with groups beta (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mpn14tech ( 716482 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @12:49AM (#9649777)
    The nice thing about the google groups beta is that you can track your favorite usenet group using a news aggregator that supports atom.

    The only downside I have found is when you select the article you do not get an option to view the article in context like you get if you are doing an ordinary search. Hopefully they will fix that.

  • address mangling sucks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jamie Zawinski ( 775 ) <jwz@jwz.org> on Friday July 09, 2004 @01:07AM (#9649839) Homepage

    I just sent this to groups-support@google.com [mailto]:

    Please don't mangle email addresses in Google Groups!

    I guess you are doing this because of some misguided belief that it will help with spam, but really all it does is decrease the utility of the internet as a communications medium. I do not hide my email address because I want people to be able to contact me, and the new Google Groups beta destroys the email addresses that I quite intentionally put in my messages. This is bad. Please don't do it.

    Here's what the old way looked like: (old way) [google.com]
    And here's the new way: (new way) [google.com]

    What I consider bugs in the new way are:

    1. destruction of email addresses in From, Sender, etc headers;

    2. destruction of email addresses in the message body;

    3. destruction of message IDs in the headers (because sometimes message IDs look like email addresses, you mangle them -- even though it's guarenteed that no email addresses will ever appear in the References or Message-ID headers.)

    4. that the returned document is of type text/html instead of type text/plain. It was a good feature of the old system that the "Original Format" link returned a plain text version of the original, tabs and all. Sometimes you want to get at the message as it was actually posted, and not at some marked up approximation thereof.

    Other than that, it looks very nice!

    • I just sent this to groups-support@google.com:

      Please don't mangle email addresses in Google Groups!

      Perhaps you should have sent your comments to gro__ps_-__up__por_t@goo__le.c__m

  • Reporting bugs? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 2004 @01:38AM (#9649941)
    I was going to report a bug, but they don't seem to provide any way for doing that.

    If anyone from Google is reading this, check this out: If the posting uses ISO-2022-JP character set, the Japanese characters show up as some kind of question marks (at least in Firefox 0.8), when viewing the posting in the default, "parsed", mode. For example: parsed article [google.com].

    BUT, if the viewing mode is set to "show original", the same posting comes up with correct characters (but with ultra-tiny font?!): original version [google.com]

  • newsreaders are much better (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baki ( 72515 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @02:14AM (#9650035)
    I just tried to subscribe to some groups, read some threads and have google groups keep track of it. I'd say it is 10 times as slow as using a good usenet client. IMO the main advantage of usenet over webforumes etc. is the availability of efficient clients, filters, scoring systems, kill-files etc. that allow you to scan through a large number of groups/threads in minimal time. No web interface will ever come close to that.

  • I wish Slashdot would emulate Google Groups' UI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alaska Jack ( 679307 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @02:34AM (#9650084) Journal
    One thing I've always admired is Google Groups' user interface -- the pane along the left-hand side makes it very clear where you are at in navigating a thread.

    Contrast this to Slashdot, where navigating the comments threads can be very confusing. I wish Slashdot could be re-written to something similar to GG. Anyone know the correct address for submitting this kind of suggestion?

    (Or, on the other hand, any good reason /. is better the way it is?)

    - Alaska Jack

  • How about their core business? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 2004 @06:28AM (#9650617)
    My fear is that Google is going to end up just like Altavista did!

    Since three months the Dutch traditional sailing ship rental market has experienced very sophisticated "Google spam" from some large booking offices. This has lead to a serious decline in business of the so called "free ships" that do not work with those booking offices. Reporting this spam to Google has had no result at all... Could this non-response lead to the end of Google? Remember that Altavista was the number one search engine until the flood of "spam" rendered their search results useless. What can be done to stop Google spam if Google does not seem to react to a large number of submitted spam reports?

    First some background information. My girlfriend's uncle has been a captain of a traditional sailing ship in the Netherlands for many years now. You can rent his crewed ship for a day, weekend, midweek or week. He is a so called "free captain" since he is not working for one of the booking offices, that in his opinion charge too much.

    One of the ways he reaches potential customers is a website which looks quite professional and until this year received a reasonable number of visitors mostly via Google. The problem is that this number has dropped dramatically since some booking offices found a way to get high positions in Google in an "illegal" way: Not with real content but with fake pages that are there to fool Googlebot.

    Some of the biggest players in the Dutch charter market (Zeilvaart.com and Zeilvloot.nl) probably hired an expert to enable them to get those high positions. I will try to explain what I found out about the method they are using.

    Zeilvaart.com
    If you search Google for: site:zeilvaart.com html [google.com] you will find about 1300 html pages that are all fake pages since it is an ASP website without real html pages. The standard layout of the fake pages is:

    Left column: menu with links to other fake pages
    Middle column: some text about a random ship
    Right column:
    - "Verzekerd zeilen..." -> some text about insurance with a link
    - "Zeilervaring niet nodig..." -> some text about sailing experience with a link
    - "Over de Zeilvaart..." -> some text about the company Zeilvaart
    Top menu: leads to the real website

    All the fake pages have file names that contain words people might search for when planning a sailing trip. The pages are all the same except for the different links to other fake pages and random ship information.

    Take for example this page that is aimed at the key phrase "zeilen IJsselmeer" ("sailing IJsselmeer" in Dutch):

    http://zeilen.zeilvaart.com/zeilen_ijsselmeer.html (Google cache) [216.239.59.104]

    All the key words are in the URL and on the page are many links to other fake pages that contain other key words, both in content and in URL name: Personeelsuitje, Vergaderarrangement IJsselmeer, SAIL Amsterdam, Zeilen Batavia, Zeilen Teambuilding, etc.

    When someone searches Google for these exact words Zeilvaart.com always shows up as one of the first results..... This is big time Google spam! What makes it even worse is that they have started to use Google as their bill board because the title of the page is:

    "Heb jij ook zin om te zeilen in het IJsselmeer? Kijk dan op de site van De Zeilvaart!" which translates to:
    "Do you also feel like sailing the IJsselmeer? Have a look at the De Zeilvaart site!"

    They have given all fake pages such commercial-like titles....

    Only clicking an option from the top menu will lead to their real website.

    The equivalent in German "segeln IJsselmeer" leads to:

  • Feel a bit disappointed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nandu_prahlad ( 706343 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @06:44AM (#9650647)
    I tried registering into Google groups, with my yahoo email id about 5 times and I was refused. The sixth time I tried my workplace id (non-hotmail or yahoo) and I got an account immediately.

    There was news sometime back how about hotmail and yahoo were blocking gmail invites.It's what you would expect an ordinary, run-of-the-mill multi-billion dollar company to do.

    Kudos to Google for a great UI. But I feel a bit disappointed.

  • No way to sort search results by date? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Helevius ( 456392 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:07AM (#9650686) Homepage
    Did anyone else notice this? I see no way to sort search results by date. Hopefully this will be added in the future.

    Helevius

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