Re: Searching for answers

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From: Vanguard (see_signature)
Date: 01/12/05 

Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 23:33:12 -0600

"DanR" <dan@my-olddeja.com> wrote in message
news:eucwLMG%23EHA.3416@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> Before I ask for help on these groups I usually do a "Find" (OE) to
> see if my
> answer might already be posted. I first use the "find in subject" and
> if that
> fails I try "find in message". After a few years of occasionally
> visiting these
> groups it occurred to me that because I initially only download
> headers... the
> "find in message" method will find nothing because there are not any
> messages
> downloaded. duh...
> Or I have read some messages and my "find in message" occasionally
> worked and
> the obvious never occurred to me.
>
>

In my case, I leave the options enabled in OE to clean out the local
store of messages older than 5 days. If you have the maintenance
options in OE enabled, you might want to increase the retention period
or disable the cleanup option. Even if you make the retention period
quite long, OE will sync up with the NNTP server to remove any posts
that are no longer on that NNTP server. Your NNTP server may keep
messages around only 14 to 30 days, you might have OE configured to
cleanup after 60 days, but when OE connects to get new headers and finds
that the messages over 30 days are gone from your NNTP server then it
deletes them from its local store to keep in sync with your NNTP server.
My ISP switched its NNTP service to Giganews and their retention periods
are a lot longer (but not *my* retention period in OE's maintenance
options). Rather than visit microsoft.* newsgroups using Giganews, I
connect to Microsoft's NNTP server (msnews.microsoft.com) to visit those
newsgroups (because then I don't eat up the quota from my Giganews
account when visiting Microsoft groups). I don't know what the
retention period is for Microsoft's NNTP server.

I usually do a Google Groups search to find old newsgroup posts. This
works if the posts you are looking for are over 4 hours old since it
seems to take that long before new posts show up at Goggle Groups (even
when using their webnews interface so it is not a propagate delay
between NNTP servers). They searching is pretty good except that you
cannot use regular expressions or specify an exact string to search on,
like in the author field a search on "Jim" will find every post that
"Jim" anywhere in the author's name instead of that exact author name.
You cannot search by e-mail address or other headers, either. But
Google Groups (used to be DejaNews) is still a good place to find old
posts regarding your topic.

One source that I don't often tap are the Yahoo! Groups. Too often I
hit one that wants me to register to get into the group. Not a problem
if I had the time to register or inclination to participate in that
group. There is very little you can tailor for a search at Yahoo!
Groups so you either end up with a lot of debris or find nothing.

So besides searching in your own NNTP client's local message store and
with Google Groups, anyone else know what is good for searching
*newsgroups* and perhaps provides for accurate definition or narrowing
of search criteria? I'm personally not interested in searching binary
groups, so something like BinCrawler or Newsrover has no appeal to me. 

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