On 7/19/05, Marty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > After recently purging most of my backuppc archives on the assumption > that it would all be available on the internet, I tried to find this > old thread, only to discover that sourceforge apparently does not > allow searching on message contents, and google no longer seems to > store any messages from any technical mailing lists!
You can hardly blame google for sourceforge's robots.txt. I think it's *stupid* for sourceforge to prevent search engines from indexing its mailing lists or forums, but people are still free to be stupid. > As an experiment I then tried searching for messages from other list > archives on google, and sure enough, none are archived there any longer. > One of the lists, debian-user, is archived by means of being gatewayed > to a newsgroup, so it's possible to find old threads that way, but it's > disturbing to think that google now seems to have a monopoly on newsgroup > archives too. I can find debian-user postings on google pretty easily by specifying "site:lists.debian.org" in my search. Trying a couple of keywords that I'd seen recently picked up a posting from last week. > This is troubling not only because I rely on message lists for much > of my trouble-shooting information, but also because I had always had > thought of my own contributions to such lists as free offerings for > the public good, and not as a potential means of profiteering by > archivists and search engine firms. The broader implications are > scary to me, and I have to wonder if it's connected with the recent > appearance of sites on which technical list questions, but not the > answers, appear in search hits, and you only get to see the answers if > you register (and presumably pay for the service as some future date). > To me that would qualify as google doing "evil." Again, you can't blame google for what other sites are or might eventually be doing. Incidentally, if you find a site that's charging for your public posts answering a query, you've probably got a decent copyright violation case. IA, however, NAL. > Maybe the most optimistic explanation would be just that google is > knucking under to the rampant copyright or lawsuit madness that's > plaguing the USA, but that still leaves a problem for technical > list users. I'd say the most optimistic explanation is that google is finding what it's able to find while respecting site owners' wishes. -- Michael A. Marsh http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
