Google Groups

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Google Groups
Google Groups logo
groups.google.de
description Newsgroup , mailing list
Registration Google account optional
languages German, others
owner Google LLC
Published February 2001

Google Groups is an online service operated by the US company Google LLC that allows certain Internet forums to be searched and used. You can also set up your own forums (“groups”). They can be used via a web interface as well as via email or via a web feed .

There is a main page, which essentially consists of an input line for search terms, as well as a search for advanced users. This allows the search to be restricted to authors, time periods, languages, groups and other criteria.

history

Usenet archive

The US company Google Inc. bought 2001 the holdings of the bankrupt operating company of Usenet -Archivs Deja News on. It was about half a billion articles.

At that time, Google itself had already collected Usenet articles and compiled them from private individuals and from CD article collections. In February 2001 the combined amount of data was made available.

After AltaVista and Remarq abandoned similar services, Google Groups remains the only publicly accessible Usenet archive that claims to make most text newsgroups searchable.

Google Groups can be used to read articles in specific groups, including a thread view and an RSS feed. If you create a free user account, you can also write articles yourself. However, there are limitations in both reading and writing compared to newsreaders .

Own Google groups

In 2004, Google Groups was expanded so that in addition to reading and writing articles in newsgroups, new discussion forums can also be set up. These are web forums limited to Google Groups and have no connection to Usenet. In addition, since then mailing lists can be set up, similar to those of the competitor Yahoo Groups. You can now only join a private Google Group with a Google account. The addition of recipients has generally been removed.

Google Groups today

These two parts of Google Groups continue to exist, but the service has been increasingly less integrated into the other Google offers. For example, hits from Google Groups are no longer displayed in Google's general web search . To do this, the sub-item “Discussions” must be selected from the navigation bar in the general web search. On the other hand, the index of Google Groups was extended to general web forums - this at the expense of Usenet, which is currently barely documented, apart from the direct and targeted search of newsgroups. Incidentally, Google Groups is overshadowed by the other popular services and receives significantly less attention in the press.

privacy

Unlike most news servers , articles in the Google Groups archive are kept indefinitely. Therefore, the statements of the authors can be found permanently in Google Groups and linked to their names. This makes it easy to create a more or less meaningful personality profile, especially for authors who write regularly . In addition, Google automatically creates a profile for each participant in groups that can be accessed. This also applies to newsgroups, i.e. also to users who have not set up an account with Google and who post on Usenet via a newsreader and a news server. The data from Google Groups can be read out and reproduced by other services (e.g. Yasni ) on the Internet, which is increasingly causing criticism.

Google Group's predecessor service Deja News had therefore already provided two options for exempting one's own posts from archiving: On the one hand, the so-called nuking lists of message ID values ​​of the articles to be removed can be specified. On the other hand, you can use the header line in the article itself to ask X-No-Archive not to include an article in archives. Google Groups supports both approaches. However, this information is not taken into account when creating the profile mentioned above. Here, Google creates complete posting statistics that are permanently available, even in retrospect for a period of several years, broken down into posts per month. The retrieval takes place via the link "Show profile" next to the name of the user in the thread view.

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Notes for Google posters
  2. ↑ Google Groups 2 with its own groups and mailing lists . In: Golem. May 13, 2004. Retrieved April 11, 2011.
  3. ↑ Google Groups Help: Using Google Groups with a Google account
  4. ↑ What is a Google Groups Profile? . In: Google Groups. Help. Retrieved April 17, 2011. - The Google Groups profile should not be confused with the Google Profile service, which provides a type of web business card and at the same time manages personalized data that is used when other Google services are used.
  5. ↑ Trapped in Google Groups and with free-board drivers - right to be forgotten?