

New Google Groups - abraham
http://groups-announcements.blogspot.com/2010/12/preview-new-google-groups.html

======
tzs
Nothing in there about whether they are going to un-fuck their handling of
Usenet groups, which they present under their Google Groups umbrella.

There are times, for instance, where a search for something like "Microsoft"
or "Bill Gates" in Google's Usenet archive will return something like 6 hits.
Really Google? In the nearly 30 years of Usenet posts you have, only 6 times
has Microsoft been mentioned?

It's not that so many posts mention Microsoft that something glitches out and
we only get partial results, because the same will happen when I do searches
that I know should return just a few hundred hits. They still often only
return 5 or 6.

There have been many times when I've been writing a post somewhere such as
here or Reddit and recalled some interesting reference from Usenet that would
make a great reference but could not get Google to cough it up.

A few days later, I'll have no trouble finding it (and the other searches work
again). But invariably it breaks again.

~~~
kahirsch
There are so many bugs in Google Group search! It should be an embarrassment
for a company which was founded on search and still has the best web search. I
had assumed that Google had just written off Groups as a loss and moved all
the developers to profit-making divisions, but evidently not, given this
announcement.

Even worse is Google patent search. Two months ago, after the
Gelernter/Microsoft patent decision, I searched for inventions with
"ininventor:Gelernter". Nada. Zero. I reported this via
[http://www.google.com/support/contact/bin/request.py?contact...](http://www.google.com/support/contact/bin/request.py?contact_type=patents)

I tried it again today. Still broken. And a search for inventor Dean Kamen
yields 10 patents, as opposed to 113 on the uspto.gov site.

Is there anybody from Google reading this that has enough influence to at
least suggest that these search problems be investigated?

~~~
tzs
For patents, search on the USPTO site, then take the patent number to
pat2pdf.org, which will give you a nice free PDF of the patent.

~~~
hboon
<http://scirus.com> is pretty good too.

Disclaimer: I used to work in the company that produced the search technology
behind it.

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forgotusername
It's as if they want to give the illusion that Groups is in any way maintained
by tacking on a half-arsed clone of Reader, and it sucks. Ignoring the
impedance mismatch between the borrowed UI and the data it projects, try
clicking on a group's Settings link.

They should consider devoting their apparently minimal allocation of
engineering time to providing an API, and leave it to those with the time and
passion to come up with a modern UI.

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clofresh
Hopefully they fixed the rampant spam problems as well

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
I'm pretty sure this is only a UI change.

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sahaj
looks great. there is an option to mark threads as read. looks and functions
somewhat like Google Reader.

------
Kilimanjaro
Unusable on an iPad.

~~~
sahaj
did you try the mobile version?

<https://groups.google.com/forum/m/>

