The Best Search Engines For Newsgroups, Mailing Lists and Forums
When you want to find information that people have posted to various groups on the Internet, the best search engines to use, in my opinion, are Deja.com (for newsgroups or discussion groups), Topica (for mailing lists) and Forum One (for website forums or bulletin boards). All of these search engines offer clear, comprehensive coverage of their search universes.
DEJA.COM - STILL THE PREMIER NEWSGROUP SEARCH ENGINE
At first glance, Deja.com looks like it has been transformed into a specialized shopping engine. However, just beneath the search box there is a link to Usenet discussion groups. Clicking on this link will transport you to Deja.com's comprehensive Usenet Discussion Service which indexes the messages on 35,000 discussion groups (newsgroups) and 18,000 proprietary groups. It's archive goes back to 1986 for some groups.
(Deja.com now refers to newsgroups or Usenet newsgroups as discussion groups or forums. For consistency, I'll refer to them as discussion groups in this article.)
Finding Groups That Interest You
You can find discussion groups devoted to your interests by browsing Deja.com's discussion group directory which is based on the Usenet structure. Or you can do a keyword search for messages about your topic and then go to the groups containing those messages. Links to some of the discussion groups that these messages appear in are listed at the top of the results list and you can narrow your search to these groups.
Searching for Messages
Deja.com gives you the choice of searching recent (past 30 days) messages, past (older than 30 days) messages, or all messages. In addition you can opt to retrieve messages in the Standard Archive (all messages except those that relate to job openings, merchandise for sale or to those containing adult content), the Job Archive, the Adult Archive, the For Sale Archive or the Complete Archive.
Power Search: The Power Search menu gives you several additional options. Some of the most useful are limiting the results by date, results type (discussions, forums, products, Deja Classic-threaded), and organizing search results by confidence (relevance), subject, author, forum, or date.
Conversational Threads: You can view conversational threads (responses to a message) by opening any message and clicking on Thread.
Search Tips: You can use quotation marks to enclose phrases and the asterisk* as a wild card to stand for different word endings. In addition, you can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, AND NOT, and NEAR. Other search syntax are available in Deja.com and are described in the Help Pages.
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