[HPFGU-Feedback] Surviving Hurricane Jo II

[Shaun Hately]

On 12 Feb 2005 at 6:19, werebearloony wrote:

> To summarize what has been a somewhat rambling post.  My idea is to 
> make all new posts to the list this summer public (with the full 
> knowledge of the list) in order to prevent too many new members as 
> well as to be able to use google to search the public posts.  And to 
> allow new members only by invitation after they have had an email 
> reply posted by a listie.   Then in September we go back to our 
> current system and we have hopefully having weathered Hurricane Jo II 
> in relative safety.

Just an observation - personally I am not in favour of public 
archives, but the proposal made here doesn't worry me that much - 
however, it is an error to think that having public archives means 
people can use google to search public posts.

While messages from public archives at yahoogroups can show up in 
google searches, nowhere near all such messages appear in a google 
search. Only some wind up in such searches.

This can be illustrated.

I run a group at yahoo that has public archives dating back to 
1998. These archives have always been public.

The group is located at: 
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dragwars

Now I go into the google advanced search page at: 
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en and place that URL into 
the domain search and search for the word 'Albion' I don't get a 
single hit.

If you search at the group itself, you get dozens of hits. It's not 
that uncommon a word on that group.

A lot of people seem to think that somehow google will index every 
single post on a publicly archived mailing list. Actually it will 
do relatively few. On a list as large as HPFGU, there will be some 
hits - but nowhere near enough to make this an effective search 
tool.

 

 
Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately | www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       | drednort at ... | ICQ: 6898200 
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one
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facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be 
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need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil
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