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Deja Debacle
From: "Deja Refugee" Re Google's take-over of DejaNews: 1. To quote searchengineshowdown.com, "the database is considerably smaller and the search features much less powerful than we had on Deja last week". Deja's interface, features and functionality are critical to many people's work everyday. Yes, Deja had deficiencies, but they pale in comparison to the effects of the take-over. And let's not hear that all the old functionality will return "real soon now" (http://groups.google.com/googlegroups/help.html ); we've already spent 2 years hearing Deja say that the dropped older postings would be restored "real soon now". 2. As of Feb. 12, all the major search engines, including Google -- and some web sites of Google's own search-engine customers -- now have THOUSANDS OF INDEXED WEB PAGES WITH LINKS GOOGLE HAS BROKEN -- links to Deja article which no longer work. For that matter, many of Deja's postings themselves contain links (also presumably now broken) to other postings. In other words, Google has instantaneously devalued the content it acquired. Has Google any concept of how it has affected professional info researchers? Many individuals now have years' worth of links to postings, which Google has now broken, with no notice. Many of those postings/links took people hours of winnowing to find. 3. A prime principle of Usenet is, "Before you post a question, first see if it's already been answered in a prior post." But now that Google has made all but the most recent content inaccessible, older answers are available only by using cumbersome search alternatives (and even then, only for selected newsgroups which have maintained rich non-Deja archives). Many people who never needed to configure their own conventional (non-Deja) access to Usenet will now be put to a great deal of trouble to obtain the scant older postings which might be available elsewhere. 4. Google has trampled the rights of thousands (millions?) of content contributors who innocently felt safe in not archiving their own contributions, believing that their content would remain publicly available without interruption. There was some advance news about the take-over, but not about the interface being disabled, the links being invalidated, or direct posting being disabled. The developers, sysadmins, webmasters and other computer-literates among us are sharp enough to know that Google's take-over could easily have been done without these arbitrary and capricious actions. (The press release at http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease48.html *did* say that Google acquired all of Deja's rights, assets and intellectual property.) Google has said that Deja's functionality is too expensive to maintain -- hard to understand if Google now owns all of Deja's hardware, etc. And it also implicitly contradicts Google's other promises to provide acceptably equivalent functionality and content in a reasonable time frame: if Deja couldn't do it, how can Google? Google's expense argument fails to explain why Google can't continue to make available Deja's interface, content, and linked-URL compatibility as it existed as of Feb. 12 (i.e. with no further updates), at least until Google's "improved" offering is available. When that happens, Google should then follow the lead of other web services which have allowed users to choose between old and new versions, at least for a transition period. Google's actions display arrogance and contemptuous disregard for (or shocking ignorance of) the needs and wishes of the computing community. I speculate that their corporate discussions anticipated this kind of reaction from that community, quickly followed by a conscious and purely marketing decision to smooth it over with saccharine platitudes. The "ignorance" speculation isn't rhetorical: Google recently said that it currently does "provide access to the most recent data, which users have told us is of paramount importance." Apparently they don't realize that the most recent data is the *least* difficult thing for people to obtain elsewhere (see http://newsone.net). Uninterrupted access to the archives is critical, and Google apparently just doesn't get it. The preponderance of postings on alt.fan.dejanews confirms the sentiments expressed in this letter. Is this how Messrs. Page & Kordistani "welcome Deja's loyal users into the growing community of Google users"? Since Google claims that Deja's interface is of no use to them, I challenge Google to provide Deja's code and oldest archives to the open-source community, and I urge others to echo that challenge. -- A Deja Refugee ============================== Dr. Dobbs Journal Linux Ireland
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