Newsgroup search

current, immediate

candid

articles stored at AltaVista

from:

subject:

newsgroups:

summary:

keywords:

I love newsgroups. I loved them long before there was a Web. I don't use them now as often as I did in the past, because there are so many groups and so many items in each of them that they have become unwieldy and time-consuming. But AltaVista makes them much easier to use now than they were a little while ago.

Clicking here will show you what a result list looks like. I chose Usenet instead of Web, and entered my query as usual. Now in my results, in the far right column, here are the email addresses of the people who posted items. To send email to any of them, just click on the address.

The next column to the left is a list of all the newsgroups that had matches to my query.

The next column to the left is the list of the items themselves. If I click on an item, I get that item served up to me by AltaVista itself. When I search the Web and click on an item, I get connected to a different Web site. But when I'm search in newsgroups, AltaVista acts as a newsreader and gives you the item directly from its own files of over 14,000 newsgroups. It keeps these items anywhere from three weeks to about six months, depending on the whim of the person who runs the machine. If he likes the group, it stays a long time. But don't count on anything being there more than about three weeks. AltaVista is not meant to serve as a newsgroup archive.

One of the things that happens because these are stored at AltaVista, when you retrieve an item, the words in your query are highlighted in bold in the text displayed.

If the item you want happens to be a computer program or a picture, you can click on "B" to retrieve it as a binary file, so it won't be corrupted in the transmission.

And if you have to be far away from AltaVista and you'd prefer to get the news item from a local newsserver rather than from AltaVista, just click on "L". For instance, somebody in Russia might find that handy. You get the very same item, but perhaps faster.

Now why would you want to search through newsgroups? There are plenty of good reasons. I've always found that the information in newsgroups is often more current, and sometimes more accurate as well, than the information on Web sites. Corporate Web pages are typically written like annual reports. They go through committees. And they take forever to be posted. It might be weeks after a press release first appeared before it was posted on the Web site, because of corporate procedures.

If I go to a newsgroup, I'm going to see what people are saying today -- what they are saying candidly, what they think, what they feel. They don't get approvals for what they post there.

I can also limit my search to particular aspects of a newsgroup item. For Web searches, you could use commands like link: and host: For newsgroups, you can use from: subject: newsgroups: summary:

You can use this tool to do some very interesting competitive research. For instance, you could search

+from:ford.com

which looks for items posted by employees of Ford,

+newsgroups:comp

which limits the search to computer-related newsgroups,

Then I can search for mentions of Digital's products or competitors' products and find out what people at Ford are saying about them today. Or I could search for mentions of "bug" or "problem". I can get an early warning if people are saying nasty or good things about us or our competitors. Or maybe I can get an early warning about major projects that are going out for bids. It's a useful source. Next slide

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