If you're looking for information posted to newsgroups, no other search engine comes close to Deja News (http://www.dejanews.com) in comprehensiveness and features. It now indexes messages in 50,000 newsgroups, and maintains archives of thousands of newsgroups going back to 1995. It's difficult to find a subject that hasn't been discussed by the millions of people participating in these groups.
Search results include the date a message was posted, its subject (or part of it), the newsgroup it was posted to and its author. You can choose to receive results in a threaded format which arranges messages grouped with their responses. In addition, you can choose to view the conversational thread of any message that you open.
It's often difficult to judge the credibility of information posted to a newsgroup. One way to learn more about the author of a message you're reading is to select Author Profile which lists all the articles the person has ever posted to any newsgroup.
Finding the Newsgroup For You
Deja News is invaluable for finding newsgroups in which particular subjects are discussed. Its Interest Finder feature will give you a list of all the newsgroups with posts that include your search terms. You can view the messages containing your subject words in each of the newsgroups on the list.
The Browse Groups feature shows you which newsgroups exist in the categories you choose and demonstrates their relationship to each other. You can read the messages in each of these newsgroups, search for your subject and post messages if you desire. For example, if you're interested in dogs, you can decide whether you're most interested in the newsgroup about breeds, activities, behavior, health, etc.
DEJA NEWS SEARCH TIPS
Deja News has powerful search capabilities, but its search system is, well . . . unusual. While you can perform searches using only menus, you'll get more satisfactory results if you learn how to use a few simple search operators.
In the Quick Search mode (which is adequate for many searches), your only option is searching for items that contain all the words or phrases you enter in the search box. The plus and minus signs you can use in other search engines won't work in Deja News. Unlike many other search engines, Deja News completely ignores capitalization.
