Message boards were one of the internet’s first inventions, dating back to 1979 at Duke University. Since then, Usenet and other clients have offered thousands of groups on every conceivable topic, generating in the process over a billion posts.

Recently, Yahoo and AOL have had success generating posts and traffic on their groups, and now Google Groups has entered the mix.

Google won’t do anything unless they can do it better, so how are their groups different from others? For starters, you can access the Usenet archive dating back to 1981. If that isn’t enough, your post will appear within 10 seconds of hitting enter and will be indexed by Google’s spiders within 10 minutes.

Google, like Yahoo, offers integration between Groups and the Google mail service, sending news of posting to your inbox. The “daily digest” feature offered by Google can be buggy, sending an email after every post instead of only one per day.

Following are some tips for getting the most out of Google Groups. Click EasyEdit to add your own.

Advanced Groups search

Click the Advanced Search button to further restrict your search results. It has all the features that other Google searches have, plus you can search by group, by date, or by subject. You can also turn on SafeSearch so you don’t get anything naughty back in your search results.

UseNet history

Google has taken internet history into its hands by storing the entire UseNet universe dating back to 1981. The content is not only searchable, but is accessible as an interactive UseNet timeline showing important dates in computer history: first UseNet message, first mention of Microsoft DOS, first mention of MTV, of the first Star Wars movie. The best sentence from the early ‘80s internet is, “I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts of the Star Wars series.” You gotta check it out!

Groups alerts

Like Google News, you can set alerts for Groups, so you’ll get an email any time someone talks about your favorite topic. Check it out.


See also:

• Froogle
• Fun With Google
• Gmail
• Google Book Search
• Google Calendar

• Google Maps
• Google News
• Google Search Tips
• Google Zeitgeist
• Image Search
• Your Website and Google