On 8/9/2011 7:32 AM, Home Guy wrote:
SMS wrote:

To each his own, but I've seen frequent complaints about Google
Groups going back years, it appears to be a perpetually buggy
system.

The archives it provides of Usenet are extremely useful,

That was probably true in the past (5+ years ago) but for a long time
now the use of the search interface to find articles based on one
criteria or another is very broken.

http://groups.google.com/advanced_search?q=&

Searching for words, phrases or even an exactly quoted subject line
results in a lot of false-negative and spurious results.

Entering in a specific group-name on the newsgroup line will frequently
return a list of results from other groups.

And even when you select the "google-groups" radio button (intended
presumably to give usenet-only results), you'll usually end up getting a
mix of usenet and google-group results.

Yes, all true. They've really worsened it since taking over from Dejanews.

I suspect that Google Groups is the poor stepchild at Google so they
don't assign their most experienced personnel to it, resulting in the
mess that it's become.

I've made the case before in other newsgroups that I really don't see
how google can or has been leveraging usenet for financial gain. We all
know how they do that with other products, like gmail or the web-search
interface. With gmail, google's servers read your e-mail and try to
come up with applicable or relavent advertizing to show you on the
right-hand side of the screen as you read your mail.

They try to put up appropriate sponsored links in Google Groups, but
they do a poor job of it.

Amusing video about Gmail at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXZOQAbatTE