Deja Acquired by Google

Deja.com is gone. The Usenet news repository and search engine has been acquired by Google and is now available with a completely different interface at Google Groups. The Deja.com and dejanews.com domain names redirect to Google Groups. At this point, posting capabilities are gone as are the advanced search capabilities of the old Deja. Only the past six months worth of Usenet postings (from Aug. 2000 on) are available. The press release implies that more of the old postings will be added. More details are available in the Google Groups Usenet Help file, which also mentions that the current database contains only Usenet postings archived by Google. This implies that none of the Deja database has actually been loaded yet on Google. While it is great to know that search access to the Usenet archives will continue, at this point the database is considerably smaller and the search features much less powerful than we had on Deja last week.