The Answers

NOTE: You may have noticed that you did not receive a mailing last week. Events prevented that, and you will be missing a mailing for next week as well. However, the following information should make up for those losses.

You might enter your question into Google or another of the web’s search engines. Better yet, you might try your query with Google Groups.

What started as an archive of Usenet* discussions has now morphed into a different animal. With the recent introduction of the new interface and features, Google.Groups now allow anyone to create discussion and mailing lists. You can also search the expanded listing of groups as well as the Usenet sources for the specialized information you need. You can see the new version at the following link: http://groups-beta.google.com/

You may already be familiar with Yahoo! Groups. This is a much older network that, according to Wikipedia, is the most popular and best-known provider of electronic mailing lists. Yahoo! Groups developed differently from Google.Groups. Yahoo! Groups were launched in 1998 as a logical extension of services that had already been developed by Yahoo! — message boards. It provides other functions on the Yahoo! web site, such as calendar systems and file uploading. A Yahoo! ID is now required to use the basic mailing list function. One can receive messages from Yahoo! Groups individually, as a daily digest, or by logging into the group on the Yahoo! Site.

Yahoo! Groups have their own purpose, but they are not as useful in the search for information as Google.Groups. For instance, when I type in the question “What is the meaning of life?” into the “Groups Home” search function on the Yahoo! Groups site I get a hodgepodge of mostly unrelated information. If I type it into the Google.Groups search function, I get links to the alt.philosophy, alt.atheism, alt.support.depression, alt.zen, and many other groups with opinions on the subject. If I enclose my search in quotation marks, which limits the items to only those references which are exactly like the enclosed terms, I get over 55 pages of links from Google.Groups.

Google Groups resembles Yahoo! Groups more now with the redesign. The ability to create and customize groups, upload files, create member profiles, etc. are new features that can be reviewed in the Google-Groups Beta Tour.

What does all this mean for you? Well, if you’ve read this far you have gotten the key to my most valuable secret in working with computers. Whenever I run into a software or hardware problem that is frustrating me, I immediately go to Google.Groups and type in the question. Sometimes I have to type it in several ways to get the best answer, but I almost always find just what I need. I cannot begin to tell you how much time this saves me in solving those difficult or previously unsolvable problems.

You owe me for this one!

Some of this information came from Research Buzz ( http://www.researchbuzz.org/ ) and some came from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page )

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From Wikipedia: Usenet (USEr NETwork) is a global, distributed bulletin board system (BBS). It is a distributed Internet discussion system that . . . was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users read and post e-mail-like messages (called “articles”) to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is distributed among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Individual users download and post messages to a single server, usually operated by their ISP or university, and the servers exchange the messages between each other.

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