How long do questions remain in the database?

[sheana]

Can you tell me how long mine or anyone's questions remain in the database?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Summer]

You can search the archives - it goes way back!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The msnews server keeps messages at least 60-90 days, I think, but they are
archived "permanently" by Google.

 

[sheana]

Thanks for answering my question. If Google archives them permanently, then
how do I find them...can you give me an example? Thanks in advance.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

An ordinary Google search nowadays will turn up newsgroup posts (to the
dismay of some who would like to see these results confined to Groups
search), but if you want to search only in newsgroups, then click on the
arrow beside More on the Google home page toolbar and choose Groups. You can
search groups generally, but if you want to search only a specific group of
range of groups, you can click on Advanced Groups Search and limit your
search to, say, "microsoft.public.word.*" You can also specify an author,
subject line, date range, etc., in addition to the search terms.

 

[Jay Freedman]

Go to http://groups.google.com/advanced_search and enter any combination of
keywords, newsgroup, author's name, and date that applies to the message you're
looking for.

I'm guessing that Suzanne put quotes around "permanently" because Google makes
no promises about how long they'll continue to keep everything. However, I can
still find a couple of my posts from October 1993.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all
may benefit.

 

[Tony Jollans]

How did Google, which hasn't itself been around since 1993, get hold of
posts from then? The implication is that there must be another archive
somewhere.

 

[grammatim]

It took over something called "Deja News."

How did Google, which hasn't itself been around since 1993, get hold of
posts from then? The implication is that there must be another archive
somewhere.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

As grammatim says, posts had been archived "forever" at DejaNews, which
Google acquired (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News). At the time,
there were considerable misgivings on the part of Usenet users, but in fact
Google has proved to be a worthy successor, although, as I indicated, many
Google users wish that Usenet posts were not returned along with other
results of an ordinary "Web" search. The problem, of course, is that there
are so many Web services "slurping" the NGs, that any spider crawling the
Web is going to find NG posts reproduced on these sites.

 

[Tony Jollans]

Thank you, both.

--
Enjoy,
Tony

As grammatim says, posts had been archived "forever" at DejaNews, which
Google acquired (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_News). At the time,
there were considerable misgivings on the part of Usenet users, but in
fact Google has proved to be a worthy successor, although, as I indicated,
many Google users wish that Usenet posts were not returned along with
other results of an ordinary "Web" search. The problem, of course, is that
there are so many Web services "slurping" the NGs, that any spider
crawling the Web is going to find NG posts reproduced on these sites.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA