Google Groups Watch -- New Functionality

I was completely amazed at the response to Google's purchase of Deja -- a lot of folks are very angry that the search interface was as limited as it was at launch. I'm going to keep an eye on the interface and report on changes/upgrades every ten days or so.

In the Google advanced search (at http://groups.google.co m/advanced_group_search ) you may now search by message ID number and subject. If you're like me and advanced search interfaces make you cringe, here are the special syntaxes that you can usein the basic interface:

Group == group: (example group:rec.arts.*)
Message Subject == insubject: (example insubject:discworld)
Author == author: (example author:fred)
Message ID # == msgid: (example msgid:8675309)

You can add these syntaxes to a regular Google Groups search. For example, this will work:

group:comp* "all your base are belong to us"

You can also force stopword searches like you can in the regular Web search:

group:comp* "all your base +are belong +to us"

You can also mix syntaxes (though I haven't tried every combination):

group:comp* insubject:"all your base"

(NOTE: If these don't work for you, try going back to groups.google.com and starting over. I noticed that a couple of times my searches stopped working in the basic search interface after several searches. I don't know if it was me or Google Groups.)

Posted to Search Engines-Google | TrackBack