Deja News
From Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, by MultiMedia
The Deja News Research Service was an archive of messages posted
to Usenet discussion groups, started in 1995 by Steve Madere in Austin,
Texas. Its powerful search engine
capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and
significantly changed the perceived nature of online discussion.
![The Deja News logo as it appeared in 1997](./modules/Google_Guide-MM/images/Deja_N7.gif)
The Deja News logo as it appeared in 1997.
While archives of Usenet discussions had been kept for as long as the
medium existed, Deja News offered a novel combination of features. It was
available to the general public, provided a simple World Wide Web user
interface, allowed searches across all
archived newsgroups, returned immediate results, and retained messages
indefinitely. The search facilities
transformed Usenet from a loosely organized and ephemeral communication tool
into a valued information repository. The archive's relative permanence,
combined with the ability to search
messages by author, raised concerns about privacy and confirmed oft-repeated
past admonishments that posters should be cautious in discussing themselves
and others. (Von Rospach)
While Madere was initially reluctant to remove archived material, protests
from users and legal pressure led to the introduction of "nuking," a method
for posters to permanently remove their own messages from
search results. It already supported the
use of an "X-No-Archive" message header, which if present would cause an
article to be omitted from the archive. This did not prevent others from
quoting the material in a later message and causing it to be stored.
Copyright holders were also allowed to have material removed from the
archive. According to Humphrey Marr of Deja News, copyright actions most
frequently came from the Church of Scientology.
![The deja.com logo used from 1999](./modules/Google_Guide-MM/images/Deja_N8.gif)
The deja.com logo used from 1999.
The service was eventually expanded beyond
search. My Deja News offered the ability to read Usenet in the
traditional chronological, per-group manner, and to post new messages to the
network. Deja Communities were private Internet forums offered primarily to
businesses. In 1999 the site (now known as Deja.com) sharply changed
direction and made its primary feature a shopping comparison service. During
this transition, which involved relocation of the servers, many older
messages in the Usenet archive became unavailable.
By late 2000 the company, in financial distress, sold the shopping service
to eBay, who incorporated the technology into their half.com service. By
2001 the search service was shut down. The
archives were acquired by Google and reintroduced as Google Groups. Archive
coverage was extended back to 1981 with the addition of collections from
private sources. Longtime users sometimes refer to the resurrected archive
as "Dejagoogle" or "Gooja."
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