Google Groups

Last updated

Google Groups
Developer(s) Google
Initial releaseFebruary 12, 2001;23 years ago (2001-02-12)
Type Newsgroups, electronic mailing lists
Website groups.google.com

Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. Until February 2024, the Groups service also provided a gateway to Usenet newsgroups, both reading and posting to them, [1] via a shared user interface. In addition to accessing Google groups, registered users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere. [2]

Contents

Google Groups became operational in February 2001, following Google's acquisition of Deja's Usenet archive. Deja News had been operational since March 1995.

Google Groups allows any user to freely conduct and access threaded discussions, via either a web interface or e-mail. There are at least two kinds of discussion groups: forums specific to Google Groups (like mailing lists) [3] and Usenet groups, accessible by NNTP, for which Google Groups acts as gateway and unofficial archive. The Google Groups archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dates back to 1981. [4]

On December 15, 2023, Google announced that Google Groups would end support posting or viewing new Usenet content on February 22, 2024, with existing archives remaining available. [5]

History

Deja News

The Deja News logo as it appeared in 1997 Deja News logo.png
The Deja News logo as it appeared in 1997

The Deja News Research Service was an archive of messages posted to Usenet discussion groups, started in March 1995 by Steve Madere in Austin, Texas. Its powerful search engine capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and significantly changed the perceived nature of online discussion. This archive was acquired by Google in 2001.[ This paragraph needs citation(s) ]

While archives of Usenet discussions had been kept for as long as the medium existed, Deja News offered a novel combination of features. It was available to the general public, provided a simple World Wide Web user interface, allowed searches across all archived newsgroups, returned immediate results, and retained messages indefinitely. The search facilities transformed Usenet from a loosely organized and ephemeral communication tool into a valued information repository. The archive's relative permanence, combined with the ability to search messages by author, raised concerns about privacy and confirmed often-repeated past admonishments that posters should be cautious in discussing themselves and others. [6]

While Madere was initially reluctant to remove archived material, protests from users and legal pressure led to the introduction of "nuking", a method for posters to permanently remove their own messages from search results. It already supported the use of an "X-No-Archive" message header, which if present would cause an article to be omitted from the archive. This did not prevent others from quoting the material in a later message and causing it to be stored. Copyright holders were also allowed to have material removed from the archive. According to Humphrey Marr of Deja News, copyright actions most frequently came from the Church of Scientology. [7]

The capability to "nuke" postings was kept open for many years but later removed without explanation under Google's tenure. Google also mistakenly restored previously "nuked" messages at one point, angering many users. [8] "Nukes" that were in effect at the time when Google removed the possibility are still honored, however. Since May 2014, European users can request to have search results for their name from Google Groups, including their Usenet archive, delinked under the right to be forgotten law. As of 2015, Google Groups was one of the ten most delinked sites. [9] If Google does not grant a delinking, Europeans can appeal to their local data protection agencies. [10]

Change of direction

The deja.com logo used from 1999 Deja-dot-com-logo.png
The deja.com logo used from 1999

The service was eventually expanded beyond search. "My Deja News" offered the ability to read Usenet in the traditional chronological, per-group manner, and to post new messages to the network. Deja Communities were private Internet forums offered primarily to businesses. In 1999 the site (now known as Deja.com) sharply changed direction[ colloquialism? ] and made its primary feature a shopping comparison service. During this transition, which involved relocation of the servers, many older messages in the Usenet archive became unavailable. By late 2000 the company, in financial distress, sold the shopping service to eBay, who incorporated the technology into their half.com services.

Google Groups

Previous Google Groups logo Google Groups logo.gif
Previous Google Groups logo

By 2001, the Deja search service was shut down. In February 2001, Google acquired Deja News and its archive, and transitioned its assets to groups.google.com. [11] Users were then able to access these Usenet newsgroups through the new Google Groups interface.

By the end of 2001, the archive had been supplemented with other archived messages dating back to May 11, 1981. [12] [13] [14] These early posts from 1981–1991 were donated to Google by the University of Western Ontario, based on archives by Henry Spencer from the University of Toronto. [15] A short while later,[ when? ] Google released a new version that allowed users to create their own non-Usenet groups.

When AOL discontinued access to Usenet around 2005, it recommended Google Groups instead. [16]

In 2008, Google broke the Groups search functionality and left it nonfunctional for about a year, until a Wired article spurred the company to fix the problems. [17] [18]

On February 13, 2015, a Vice Media story reported that the ability to do advanced searches across all groups had again become nonfunctional, and to date, Google has neither fixed nor acknowledged the problem. The researcher interviewed stated, "Advanced searches within specific groups appear to be working, but that's hardly useful for any form of research—be it casual or academic." [19]


As of January 2024, Google Groups carries a header notice, saying:

Effective from 22 February 2024, Google Groups will no longer support new Usenet content. Posting and subscribing will be disallowed, and new content from Usenet peers will not appear. Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today.

An explanatory page adds: [20]

In addition, Google’s Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server and associated peering will no longer be available, meaning Google will not support serving new Usenet content or exchanging content with other NNTP servers.


This change will not impact any non-Usenet content on Google Groups, including all user and organization-created groups.

Criticism

Vice and Wired contributors have criticized Google for its unannounced discontinuation of the Google Groups Advanced Search page and the ability to perform advanced searches across all groups, leaving it nearly impossible to find postings without either knowing keywords from them that are unique across Google Groups' entire multi-decade archive of posts, or else knowing beforehand which newsgroup(s) they were posted in. [17] [18] [19]

Blocking

Google Groups was blocked in Turkey on April 10, 2008, by a court order. [21] According to The Guardian , the court banned Google Groups following a libel complaint by Adnan Oktar against the service. Google Groups was the first of several websites to be blocked by the Turkish government in rapid succession solely for including material that allegedly offended Islam. [22] The ban was removed a month later on May 15, 2008. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

A frequently asked questions (FAQ) list is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps. The purpose of a FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns; however, the format is a useful means of organizing information, and text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked.

A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">News server</span> Type of server software

A news server is a collection of software used to handle Usenet articles. It may also refer to a computer itself which is primarily or solely used for handling Usenet. Access to Usenet is only available through news server providers.

The Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) is an application protocol used for transporting Usenet news articles (netnews) between news servers, and for reading/posting articles by the end user client applications. Brian Kantor of the University of California, San Diego, and Phil Lapsley of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote RFC 977, the specification for the Network News Transfer Protocol, in March 1986. Other contributors included Stan O. Barber from the Baylor College of Medicine and Erik Fair of Apple Computer.

<i>alt.*</i> hierarchy Subclass of Usenet newsgroups

The alt.* hierarchy is a major class of newsgroups in Usenet, containing all newsgroups whose name begins with "alt.", organized hierarchically. The alt.* hierarchy is not confined to newsgroups of any specific subject or type, although in practice more formally organized groups tend not to occur in alt.*. The alt.* hierarchy was created by John Gilmore and Brian Reid.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sporgery</span> Posting a flood of articles to a Usenet group, with falsified headers.

Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.

X-No-Archive, also known colloquially as xna, is a newsgroup message header field used to prevent a Usenet message from being archived in various servers.

A discussion group is a group of individuals, typically who share a similar interest, who gather either formally or informally to discuss ideas, solve problems, or make comments. Common methods of conversing including meeting in person, conducting conference calls, using text messaging, or using a website such as an Internet forum. People respond, add comments, and make posts on such forums, as well as on established mailing lists, in news groups, or in IRC channels. Other group members could choose to respond by posting text or image.

Newsgroup spam is a type of spam where the targets are Usenet newsgroups.

Gmane is an e-mail to news gateway. It allows users to access electronic mailing lists as if they were Usenet newsgroups, and also through a variety of web interfaces. Since Gmane is a bidirectional gateway, it can also be used to post on the mailing lists. Gmane is an archive; it never expires messages. Gmane also supports importing list postings made prior to a list's inclusion on the service.

When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, or Usenet, the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.

Crossposting is the act of posting the same message to multiple information channels; forums, mailing lists, or newsgroups. This is distinct from multiposting, which is the posting of separate identical messages, individually, to each channel,. Enforcement actions against crossposting individuals vary from simple admonishments up to total lifetime bans. In some cases, on email lists and forums, an individual is put under a stealth ban where their posts are distributed back to them as if they were being distributed normally, but the rest of the subscribers are not sent the messages. This is easily detected if the Stealthed individual has two different, and totally non-associated identities in the channel, such that the non-stealthed identity will see a different set of messages, lacking the posts of the stealthed individual, in their view of the channel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Newsreader (Usenet)</span> Application program

A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new articles. In addition to text-based articles, Usenet is also used to distribute binary files, generally in dedicated "binaries" newsgroups.

Usenet II was a proposed alternative to the classic Usenet hierarchy, started in 1998. Unlike the original Usenet, it was peered only between "sound sites" and employed a system of rules to keep out spam.

Control messages are a special kind of Usenet post that are used to control news servers. They differ from ordinary posts by a header field named Control. The body of the field contains control name and arguments.

A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usenet</span> Worldwide computer-based distributed discussion system

Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

Easynews, Inc is a HW Media Usenet/newsgroup reseller. Founded in 1994, Easynews service is available to individual users through a subscription model and as an outsourced service to internet service providers. Easynews offers Usenet access both through traditional Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) servers as well as a web interface using a standard web browser.

The Meow Wars were an early example of a flame war sent over Usenet which began in 1996 and ended circa 1998. Its participants were known as "Meowers". The war was characterized by posters from one newsgroup "crapflooding", or posting a large volume of nonsense messages, to swamp on-topic communication in other groups. Ultimately, the flame war affected many boards, with Roisin Kiberd writing in Motherboard, a division of Vice, that esoteric Internet vocabulary was created as a result of the Meow Wars.

References

Citations

  1. ↑ "What is a Usenet Newsgroup?". Google Groups Help Center. Archived from the original on April 20, 2009. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  2. ↑ "Can I use Google Groups to archive another mailing list?". Google Groups Help Center. Archived from the original on November 5, 2011. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  3. ↑ "How do I create my own group?". Google Groups Help Center. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  4. ↑ "How far back does Google's Usenet archive go?". Google Groups Help Center. Archived from the original on October 26, 2007. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Google Groups ending support for Usenet - Google Groups Help". support.google.com. Retrieved December 15, 2023.
  6. ↑ Chuq Von Rospach. A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community . Usenet introductory document posted regularly until 1999.
  7. ↑ Lawton, George (January 1997). Internet archives: Who's doing it? And can you protect your privacy?. SunWorld.
  8. ↑ Edwards, Douglas (2011). I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 . U.S.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. pp.  209–213. ISBN   978-0-547-41699-1.
  9. ↑ "Transparency Report" . Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  10. ↑ Arthur, Charles (June 27, 2014). "Google removing 'right to be forgotten' search links in Europe". The Guardian.
  11. ↑ "Google Acquires Usenet Discussion Service and Significant Assets from Deja.com". February 12, 2001.
  12. ↑ "20 Year Archive on Google Groups". December 11, 2001.
  13. ↑ "Full Usenet archive now available". Pandia. April 29, 2001. Archived from the original on March 12, 2006.
  14. ↑ "Digital history saved". BBC News Online. December 14, 2001.
  15. ↑ Katharine Mieszkowski (January 7, 2002). "The Geeks Who Saved Usenet". Salon . Archived from the original on September 2, 2003.
  16. ↑ Oates, John (January 25, 2005). "AOL ditches newsgroups". The Register .
  17. 1 2 Poulsen, Kevin (October 7, 2009). "Google's Abandoned Library of 700 Million Titles". Wired. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  18. 1 2 Poulsen, Kevin (October 8, 2009). "Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive". Wired. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  19. 1 2 Braga, Matthew (February 13, 2015). "Google, a Search Company, Has Made Its Internet Archive Impossible to Search". Motherboard. Retrieved January 18, 2017.
  20. ↑ "Google Groups ending support for Usenet - Google Groups Help". Google Support.
  21. ↑ "Turkey bans Google Groups". Today's Zaman. April 12, 2008. Archived from the original on June 19, 2009. Retrieved August 10, 2010.
  22. ↑ Butt, Riazat (September 18, 2008). "Turkish court bans Richard Dawkins website". The Guardian. London. Retrieved May 3, 2010.
  23. ↑ "Google'ın yasağı kalktı, sıra Youtube'da - Timeturk: Haber, Timeturk Haber, HABER, Günün haberleri, yorum, spor, ekonomi, politika, sanat, sinema". www.timeturk.com. Retrieved November 14, 2019.

General and cited sources

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