Google Groups
Encyclopedia
Google Groups is a service from Google Inc.
that supports discussion groups
, including many Usenet
newsgroups, based on common interests. The service was started in 1995 as Deja News, and was transitioned to Google Groups after a February 2001 buyout.
Membership in Google Groups is free of charge and many groups are anonymous. Users can find discussion groups related to their interests and participate in threaded conversations, either through a web interface or by e-mail. They can also start new groups. Google Groups also includes an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dating back to 1981 and supports reading and posting to Usenet groups. Users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.
The Deja News Research Service was an archive
of messages posted to Usenet
discussion groups, started in March 1995 by Steve Madere
in Austin, Texas
. Its powerful search engine
capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and significantly changed the perceived nature of online
discussion.
While archives of Usenet discussions had been kept for as long as the medium existed, Deja News offered a novel combination of features. It was available to the general public, provided a simple World Wide Web
user interface, allowed searches across all archived newsgroup
s, returned immediate results, and retained messages indefinitely. The search facilities transformed Usenet from a loosely organized and ephemeral communication tool into a valued information repository. The archive's relative permanence, combined with the ability to search messages by author, raised concerns about privacy
and confirmed oft-repeated past admonishments that posters should be cautious in discussing themselves and others.
While Madere was initially reluctant to remove archived material, protests from users and legal pressure led to the introduction of "nuking," a method for posters to permanently remove their own messages from search results. It already supported the use of an "X-No-Archive
" message header, which if present would cause an article to be omitted from the archive. This did not prevent others from quoting the material in a later message and causing it to be stored. Copyright
holders were also allowed to have material removed from the archive. According to Humphrey Marr of Deja News, copyright actions most frequently came from the Church of Scientology.
The service was eventually expanded beyond search. My Deja News offered the ability to read Usenet in the traditional chronological, per-group manner, and to post new messages to the network. Deja Communities were private Internet forum
s offered primarily to businesses. In 1999 the site (now known as Deja.com) sharply changed direction and made its primary feature a shopping comparison service. During this transition, which involved relocation of the servers, many older messages in the Usenet archive became unavailable. By late 2000 the company, in financial distress, sold the shopping service to eBay
, who incorporated the technology into their half.com
service.
By the end of 2001 the archive had been supplemented with other archived messages dating back to May 11, 1981. These early posts from 1981–1991 were donated to Google by the University of Western Ontario
, based on archives by Henry Spencer
from the University of Toronto
. Shortly after, Google released a new version, which allowed users to create their own (non-Usenet) groups.
In February 2006, Google modified the interface of Google Groups, adding profiles and post ratings.
In October 2010, Google announced it would be dropping support for welcome messages, pages, and files effective January 2011.
In December 2010, Google rolled out a New UI Preview with more Gmail/Reader-Like functionality.
groups, and non-Usenet groups that are more similar to mailing list
s. The latter type is accessible only by web or by e-mail, not by NNTP. The Google Groups user interface and help messages do not use a distinct name for mailing-list style groups, referring to both styles of group as "Google Groups."
Google recognizes the X-No-Archive
header and displays messages containing it for only seven days, after which the article becomes no longer available to the public. Google also recognizes the "-- " Usenet signature delimiter, and removes the significant space at the end (thus, proper Usenet signatures can't be added to articles posted via Google Groups).
Profiles
Rating posts
Starring threads
E-mail masking
Group web pages
. In these groups, users can ask and answer questions about the relevant Google service. Each official group has a Google representative who occasionally responds to queries. Google representatives always have a blue G symbol in their nicknames.
Some official groups include:
In addition to the Groups, and Forums (see below), Google also now has Product Ideas for giving feedback for some of their products including the Google Groups New Preview UI:
Google also uses Google Groups to host their Google Friends and Google Page Creator Updates mailing lists, which are announcement-only groups where only moderators can post.
There are also help forums, which appear to have different functionality from Google Groups:
of "lusers" and "lamers" arriving in established groups en masse. The Usenet Improvement Project provides several killfile examples to block messages posted by Google Groups users in several newsreaders.
On October 16, 2003, John Wiley & Sons
sent a letter to Google after discovering that copyrighted text from a book they published was made available for download on a Google group.
Slashdot and Wired contributors have criticized Google for its inattention to a search engine for Google Groups, leaving many older postings virtually inaccessible.
, the court banned Google Groups following a libel complaint by Adnan Oktar
against the service. Google Groups was the first of several websites to be blocked by the Turkish
Government in rapid succession solely for including material which allegedly offended Islam
.
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
that supports discussion groups
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
, including many Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
newsgroups, based on common interests. The service was started in 1995 as Deja News, and was transitioned to Google Groups after a February 2001 buyout.
Membership in Google Groups is free of charge and many groups are anonymous. Users can find discussion groups related to their interests and participate in threaded conversations, either through a web interface or by e-mail. They can also start new groups. Google Groups also includes an archive of Usenet newsgroup postings dating back to 1981 and supports reading and posting to Usenet groups. Users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.
Deja News
Archive
An archive is a collection of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of an organization...
of messages posted to Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
discussion groups, started in March 1995 by Steve Madere
Steve Madere
Steve Madere was the founder and CEO of Deja News and holds a Masters in Science degree in physics from the University of California at San Diego....
in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
. Its powerful search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and significantly changed the perceived nature of online
ONLINE
ONLINE is a magazine for information systems first published in 1977. The publisher Online, Inc. was founded the year before. In May 2002, Information Today, Inc. acquired the assets of Online Inc....
discussion.
While archives of Usenet discussions had been kept for as long as the medium existed, Deja News offered a novel combination of features. It was available to the general public, provided a simple World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
user interface, allowed searches across all archived newsgroup
Newsgroup
A usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
s, returned immediate results, and retained messages indefinitely. The search facilities transformed Usenet from a loosely organized and ephemeral communication tool into a valued information repository. The archive's relative permanence, combined with the ability to search messages by author, raised concerns about privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
and confirmed oft-repeated past admonishments that posters should be cautious in discussing themselves and others.
While Madere was initially reluctant to remove archived material, protests from users and legal pressure led to the introduction of "nuking," a method for posters to permanently remove their own messages from search results. It already supported the use of an "X-No-Archive
X-No-Archive
X-No-Archive, also known colloquially as xna, is a newsgroup message header field used to prevent a Usenet message from being archived in various servers.-Origin:The need for X-No-Archive began when DejaNews debuted in 1995...
" message header, which if present would cause an article to be omitted from the archive. This did not prevent others from quoting the material in a later message and causing it to be stored. Copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
holders were also allowed to have material removed from the archive. According to Humphrey Marr of Deja News, copyright actions most frequently came from the Church of Scientology.
Change of direction
Internet forum
An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...
s offered primarily to businesses. In 1999 the site (now known as Deja.com) sharply changed direction and made its primary feature a shopping comparison service. During this transition, which involved relocation of the servers, many older messages in the Usenet archive became unavailable. By late 2000 the company, in financial distress, sold the shopping service to eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
, who incorporated the technology into their half.com
Half.com
Half.com is a subsidiary of eBay, in which sellers offer items at fixed prices, usually items that have a UPC, ISBN or other kind of SKU, rather than rare, old or collectible items...
service.
Google Groups
By 2001 the search service was shut down. In February 2001, Google acquired Deja News, and transitioned its assets to groups.google.com. Users were then able to access these Usenet newsgroups through the new Google Groups interface.By the end of 2001 the archive had been supplemented with other archived messages dating back to May 11, 1981. These early posts from 1981–1991 were donated to Google by the University of Western Ontario
University of Western Ontario
The University of Western Ontario is a public research university located in London, Ontario, Canada. The university's main campus covers of land, with the Thames River cutting through the eastern portion of the main campus. Western administers its programs through 12 different faculties and...
, based on archives by Henry Spencer
Henry Spencer
Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely-used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also authored The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book...
from the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
. Shortly after, Google released a new version, which allowed users to create their own (non-Usenet) groups.
In February 2006, Google modified the interface of Google Groups, adding profiles and post ratings.
In October 2010, Google announced it would be dropping support for welcome messages, pages, and files effective January 2011.
In December 2010, Google rolled out a New UI Preview with more Gmail/Reader-Like functionality.
Kinds of groups hosted by Google
Google provides two distinct kinds of groups: traditional UsenetUsenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
groups, and non-Usenet groups that are more similar to mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
s. The latter type is accessible only by web or by e-mail, not by NNTP. The Google Groups user interface and help messages do not use a distinct name for mailing-list style groups, referring to both styles of group as "Google Groups."
Google recognizes the X-No-Archive
X-No-Archive
X-No-Archive, also known colloquially as xna, is a newsgroup message header field used to prevent a Usenet message from being archived in various servers.-Origin:The need for X-No-Archive began when DejaNews debuted in 1995...
header and displays messages containing it for only seven days, after which the article becomes no longer available to the public. Google also recognizes the "-- " Usenet signature delimiter, and removes the significant space at the end (thus, proper Usenet signatures can't be added to articles posted via Google Groups).
Notable interface features
Groups search- Google SearchGoogle searchGoogle or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....
incorporates public groups into its results. Searches return the posts which most match the search query, and if any groups match, they will be displayed at the top of the results with a link to the Google Groups directory.
Profiles
- Users may create public profiles which are linked from all of their posts.
Rating posts
- A user can rate a post with 1 to 5 out of 5 stars. A post's rating is based on the average of all the user ratings it gets, and a thread's rating is based on the average rating of all the posts in the thread. Users may not rate their own posts.
Starring threads
- Users may mark up to 200 threads as "starred" to track them centrally.
E-mail masking
- To prevent scammers or spammersE-mail spamEmail spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
from harvesting e-mail addresses from a group, Google masks all e-mail addressesAddress mungingAddress munging is the practice of disguising, or munging, an e-mail address to prevent it being automatically collected and used as a target for people and organizations who send unsolicited bulk e-mail...
on its web interface by replacing up to the last 3 characters of the username with no less than three dots. To view the full e-mail address, a user must respond to a CAPTCHACAPTCHAA CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The process usually involves one computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade...
challenge. E-mail addresses are only masked when viewing a Google Group or Usenet newsgroup through the web interface, never when subscribers receive messages by e-mail, nor when the Usenet articles are distributed to other servers. Google Groups does not allow users to obfuscate their own e-mail addresses.
Group web pages
- The group pages were introduced in the beta version of October 5, 2006 (promoted from beta status on January 24, 2007). They can be edited by group members or group managers and can store files for download. Versions of pages are kept in a similar way to a WikiWikiA wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
. On September 22, 2010 Google announced plans for turning off the group pages suggesting users to move their content to Google Docs or Google SitesGoogle SitesGoogle Sites is a structured wiki- and web page-creation tool offered by Google as part of the Google Apps Productivity suite.- History :Google Sites started out as JotSpot, the name and sole product of a software company that offered enterprise social software. It was targeted mainly at...
. Starting in November 2010, the group pages became read-only (allowing only viewing/downloading existing content) while in February 2011 they were turned-off completely.
Official Google Groups
Google has created several official help groups for some of its services, such as GmailGmail
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
. In these groups, users can ask and answer questions about the relevant Google service. Each official group has a Google representative who occasionally responds to queries. Google representatives always have a blue G symbol in their nicknames.
Some official groups include:
- Google Groups Help Forum: was an official Google Groups help group until August 2, 2010, when it was archived (made read-only). To send feedback see the Google Groups Product Ideas below.
- Google Page Creator Discussion Group: an official Google Page CreatorGoogle Page CreatorGoogle Page Creator was a website creation and hosting service by Google. It was a tool for basic website design, requiring no HTML knowledge. During development, it was codenamed Trogdor, a reference to the popular Homestar Runner website...
help group.
In addition to the Groups, and Forums (see below), Google also now has Product Ideas for giving feedback for some of their products including the Google Groups New Preview UI:
- Google Groups Product Ideas: For feedback on the New Preview UI.
Google also uses Google Groups to host their Google Friends and Google Page Creator Updates mailing lists, which are announcement-only groups where only moderators can post.
There are also help forums, which appear to have different functionality from Google Groups:
- Gmail Help Forum: an official GmailGmailGmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
help forum. - Google Talk Help Forum: an official Google TalkGoogle TalkGoogle Talk is a freeware voice over Internet protocol client application offered by Google Inc. The first beta version of the program was released on August 24, 2005...
help forum. - Google Base Help Forum: an official Google BaseGoogle BaseGoogle Base was an online database provided by Google into which any user can add almost any type of content, such as text, images, and structured information in formats such as XML, PDF, Excel, RTF, or WordPerfect. As of September 2010, the product has since been promoted to Google Merchant Center...
help forum. - Google Web Search Help Forum: an official Google searchGoogle searchGoogle or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....
help forum. - Google Webmaster Help Forum: an official help forum for webmasters.
- AdWords Help Forum: an official Google AdWords help forum.
- Google Maps Forum: an official Google MapsGoogle MapsGoogle Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...
help forum. - Orkut Forum: an official OrkutOrkutOrkut is a social networking website that is owned and operated by Google Inc. The service is designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships...
help forum.
Criticism
The late Lee Rizor, also known as "Blinky the Shark," started the Usenet Improvement Project, a project which is highly critical of Google Groups and its users. The project aims to "make Usenet participation a better experience." They have accused Google Groups of turning a blind eye to an "increasing wave of spam" from its servers and of encouraging an Eternal SeptemberEternal September
Eternal September is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993...
of "lusers" and "lamers" arriving in established groups en masse. The Usenet Improvement Project provides several killfile examples to block messages posted by Google Groups users in several newsreaders.
On October 16, 2003, John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., also referred to as Wiley, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and markets its products to professionals and consumers, students and instructors in higher education, and researchers and practitioners in scientific, technical, medical, and...
sent a letter to Google after discovering that copyrighted text from a book they published was made available for download on a Google group.
Slashdot and Wired contributors have criticized Google for its inattention to a search engine for Google Groups, leaving many older postings virtually inaccessible.
Blocking
Google Groups has been blocked in Turkey since April 10, 2008 by the order of a court in Turkey. According to The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, the court banned Google Groups following a libel complaint by Adnan Oktar
Adnan Oktar
Adnan Oktar , also known as Harun Yahya, is an author and Islamic creationist. In 2007, he sent thousands of unsolicited copies of the Atlas of Creation advocating Islamic creationism to American scientists, members of Congress, and science museums...
against the service. Google Groups was the first of several websites to be blocked by the Turkish
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
Government in rapid succession solely for including material which allegedly offended Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
.