On Tue, 26 Dec 2023, Dan Koren wrote:

> On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 4:24:07 PM UTC-8, Dan Koren wrote:
>> On Tuesday, December 26, 2023 at 1:41:32 PM UTC-8, Al Eisner wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks, very interesting. I would be happy if an archive
>>> went back to the start of rmcr, Jan. 11, 1995.
>>
>> The key issue is not whether archves go back to 01/11/95.
>> The key issue is that no archive is, or could possibly be
>> complete. Messages can expire, be deleted by posters
>> or by service providers, and so on.
>>
>>> Of course there are relevant rmc posts before that.
>>> Google does have an archive going back that far.
>>
>> No usenet archive is or can be "complete", and this is
>> also tru of Google's archive, which was seeded by the
>> archive Google purchased by acquiring DejaNews.
>> Note that Google did not even exist as a company
>> in 1995! It was founded/incorporated in 1998. The
>> first version of the search engine was built by Larry
>> Page and Sergey Brin as a Stanford research project
>> starting in 1996.
>>
>>> The annoying thing about using the google archive is
>>> that the search works by threads, not by posts, and
>>> much of the interesting infornmation is in long threads
>>> (often multi-topic threads like WAYLTL). Thus it can be
>>> difficult to find what one is looking for.
>>
>> Sorry, but this is non-sense. Google's usent archive can
>> be searched using the same query language used by
>> Google's query engine:
>>
>> https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433
>
> Also:
>
> https://www.google.com/advanced_search
>
> https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/35890?hl=en

I am qyute familiar with advanced search. I do not believe it helps
with the issue I raised. If you know otherwise, post something specific
rather than just a list of (redundant) links.

Of course if a message is deleted from Usenet it is gone. A long time ago
there was a way to request that Usenet servers delete a message, but it was
never clear how widely such requests were implemented. And that facility
has not existed for a very long time. It remained possible to locally
delete a message from the Google archives, which is another one of its flaws,
and not in conformity with Usenet in general.

You write "The key issue is that no archive is, or could possibly be
>> complete." Well, duh. That's a given. The goal of a good archive
is to be as complete as possible, and to go back as far as possible, not
to resurrect the dead, which is not a reasonable request. If there is
nonsense here it is not in my post; look elsewhere.
--
Al Eisner

In article <80e7bb50-f4fe-33ab-4939-01f276f25c08@slac.stanford.edu>,
Al Eisner <eisner@slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>So, speaking selfishly, text-only arhives are fine.

Yes. Text & binary are often considered separately, and I don't
see a value to archiving binary, but maybe that's a blind spot for
me too..