VMs: Re: VMS-List-Archive Search Engine

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sebastian,

> >of trawling the archives is to find what has been discussed about a
> >particular topic or person (say, Edward Kelly, Pietro d'Abano, alchemical
> >projection, etc), which is a kind of glorified grep.
>
> yes, for the main search process i agree, but or example the date-field
> in the database would be very helpful when it comes to order emails by date
> and so on.

Google Advanced Group Search now does quite a reasonable job of selecting 
date ranges, finding by thread id, sorting by (reverse) date etc: so... 
might it simply be a better idea to see if the whole  archive can be 
email-address-mangled and made accessible via Google Groups instead?

We might even be able to set up an automatic update whereby posts to the 
lists get redirected to an email-stripping Perl script, which then posts 
that directly on to Google Groups - this would keep any searches 100% 
up-to-the-minute.

It may well be that Google Groups has a load of tools for converting text 
archives to individual mails (AIUI, they've had a load of these to deal 
with in the past), and so would have no difficulty making near-perfect 
sense of these themselves.

For a number of reasons (for example, this isn't a Usenet news group but a 
private mailing list), this may not be technically possible: but I think it 
might be a good idea for one person here to try to open up a correspondence 
with Google Groups to see if it can be arranged. Any offers for being that 
person?

BTW: I've also appended some text snipped from the Google Groups Help page 
on the process you should go through to get a newsgroup added to the list - 
but (as I mentioned) it may well turn out to be just a little bit more 
involved than that (though fingers crossed that it's a breeze). :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: email address mangling aside, are there any other reasons why the 
archive shouldn't be made universally accessible? For example, are there 
any historic posts which people would rather not be made accessible in this 
way?

                                * * * * * * *

http://www.google.com/googlegroups/help.html#added

14. How can I ask for a newsgroup to be added?

Send a message to groups-support@xxxxxxxxxx that includes the name of the 
newsgroup you would like to have added to the archive. Your request will be 
reviewed, and if it's accepted, the newsgroup will be added within a few 
days. Each request is evaluated to determine the value of the information 
the newsgroup contains, but there are no guarantees that a given newsgroup 
will be added. Please do not send more than one request to add a particular 
newsgroup as this slows the evaluation process and does not affect the 
ultimate outcome.

Note: Google maintains an archive of messages posted to Usenet, but we do 
not create the newsgroups that appear there. That is done through a process 
described in detail here. Once your newsgroup has been officially created 
and approved by the usenet community, you can request that it be added to 
the archive in Google Groups. It's important to note that Google cannot add 
newsgroups that are only available on one specific news server, unless the 
administrator of that news server decides to propagate those newsgroups 
throughout the world-wide usenet.


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