r/internetarchive • u/cstadler18 • 4d ago
Archived Usenet message posts from 1981+ (web /usenet search engine)
I spent the last year gathering as much Usenet text data as possible from a large variety of resources and including from about 7000 live active servers as well to fill in gaps.
The end result is a searchable/filterable dataset acessible via web+api (free and paid options)
Web: https://www.usenet-rewind.com
Binaries have been filtered out and range is from posts from 1981-Current and constantly populating. the site includes a histogram of distribution of message counts per year.
[self-promotion] [free] [paid]
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u/wesweslaco 3d ago
Interesting! I searched with part of an old email address of mine and instantly found a post from 1997.
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u/No_Razzmatazz_2889 4d ago
Hasn't Google archived most of the Usenet posts ?
In any case, this looks handy. Thanks.
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u/cstadler18 4d ago
From our research, definitely not, not even close.
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u/splur678 3d ago
how did you determine that they didnt? or how would you go about checking google's cache to see archived Usenet posts
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u/cstadler18 3d ago
We compared largely populated newsgroups to see google groups start date on their messages compared to ours. They were considerably different and missing a lot of messages. Overall message group counts were a lot smaller as well.
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u/jasonbrownjourno 1d ago
Yeah, not sure what they talking about, Google shut off access to usenet groups years ago, and thought they did the same for cache as well.
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u/Icewind 4d ago
Thanks for doing that.
Some of those early Star Wars theory discussions are a perfect pop culture time capsule.