Searching NetNews

With so many newsgroups and literally gigabytes of messages posted every month, finding useful information through netnews can be challenging. One of the first things you might try is looking at the FAQs for newsgroups relating to your interest. You can find archived versions of the FAQs for most newsgroups at:

http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/news/

If that fails, there are a number of search engines available that let you search the full text of all current netnews messages. To look at a list of these search engines click on:

Yahoo! Usenet Searching and Filtering

You can perform keyword searches on newsgroup messages via two of the most popular netnews search engines: reference.com at: http://www.reference.com and Deja News at: http://www.dejanews.com/

Alta Vista, one of the best WWW search engines also can search news articles. In the Search window choose the option, Usenet, on the right.

Activity:
Experiment with the Reference.com searching system at: http://www.reference.com

And the Deja News search engine at:
http://www.dejanews.com/

Compare the two and if you are taking this lesson as part of a group, post your observations about the differences in the two sites to the group.