4.10. Google Groups
Usenet
groups, text-based discussion groups covering literally hundreds of
thousands of topics, have been around since long before the World
Wide Web. Deja News used to be the repository of
Usenet information until it sold off its archive to Google in early
2001. Google filled it out still further and relaunched it as Google
Groups (http://groups.google.com). Its search
interface, shown in Figure 4-6, is rather different
from the Google Web Search, as all messages are divided into groups,
and the groups themselves are divided into topics called hierarchies.
Figure 4-6. The Google Groups home page

day. Just shy of 850 million messages are archived. As you might
imagine, that's a pretty big archive, covering
literally decades of discussion. Stuck in an ancient computer game?
Need help with that sewing machine you bought in 1982? You might be
able to find the answers here.Google Groups also allows you to participate in Usenet discussions,
handy because not all ISPs provide access to Usenet these days (and
even those that do tend to limit the number of newsgroups they
carry). See the Google Groups posting FAQ (http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/posting_faql)
for instructions on how to post to a newsgroup.
You'll have to start by locating the group to which
you want to post and that means using the hierarchy.