Usenet rewind archive search engine

If you go local, notmuch beat recoll for me on the mbox split, ~2M messages indexed in about 40 min on a cheap SSD.

Grabbed the UTZOO tapes off archive.org a while back, ~2GB compressed for 1981-1991, and recoll indexed the whole thing in an afternoon.

Oh my god this is a lifesaver. Just last week I was using Google Groups to search for old Usenet posts about the Commodore 64 and the Mimic Spartan, and I was getting "too many requests" errors 4 out of 5 times clicking a result. Happened on VPN+incognito, and in a separate browser. Just searched for what I was looking for in Rewind and immediately found the posts and even some I never saw in Google Groups results. So glad all of this is archived in multiple, non Google places

A similar one from earlier in the year:

Usenet Archives

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655905

The most prolific self-references (to myself that is) I found were UUCP maps updates because I ran a node which was in the centrally coordinated catalog (iirc it drove honey-danber to convert a!b!c paths to user@c so you didn't have to hand-route)

The second-most prolific self references were blovating across all and any groups I felt like. Nothing has changed.

Selfishly, I hate these things. No one in the 1980s and early 1990s expected the internet to become what it did. I discovered it as a dumb teenager and posted some frankly idiotic stuff. I also put my real address and phone number in the signature, because that's how you rolled back then, the entire internet was like 10 nerds.

Now, 35 years later, a lot of other stuff has mercifully decayed, but people keep bootstrapping these Usenet archives as pet projects every year, and there's never an option to opt out. Today, agents make it easier than ever to build a dossier on anyone you don't like, so this data is bound to cause some harm. And I guess when I die, the best-preserved memory of me that my grandchildren and grand-grandchildren will be able to pull up will be snarky posts from a 15-year-old on some unix-related discussion group.

Yeah, I know there's a bunch of posts there that are of genuine historical interest. But I'm just not a fan and I don't mind burning karma to speak my mind.