Google’s first acquisition was a company called Deja News. It was a small acquisition compared to things that were to come, but it was a synergistic and strategic acquisition at the time. Google acquired Deja News on Feb. 13, 2001.
What was Deja News?
Before Stack Overflow, Tek-Tips, Reddit, and wherever else technical-minded people hang out and ask questions, they tended to hang out in Usenet Newsgroups. No, Usenet wasn’t just for swapping binaries. Years of useful technical conversation took place on Usenet before it became all about piracy and warez.
Problem was the conversation may have happened years ago, so you missed it. That’s where Deja knews came in. They archived the discussions and made them searchable. The name was a play on the phrase “deja vu,” and the “news” portion of Usenet News.
Finding out about Deja News was a pivotal moment in my career. One of our local Unix experts asked me if I knew about Deja News. I did not. He said to run back to my desk and bookmark it immediately, that it was the best resource that he and his colleagues knew about.
And he was right. It seemed like every answer to every technical problem that existed in the late ’90s was stored there somewhere. It took a little bit of digging to find it sometimes, but I was able to find answers to questions long before any of that information showed up on anywhere else on the Web.
What was wrong with Deja News
The problem for Deja News was they seem to have a hard time making money. That is understandable. Many of us visiting the site were simply looking for answers to questions about things long ago bought and paid for. It is very difficult to monetize that type of search.
Over time, Deja News morphed into something barely recognizable. It even dropped the word news from its name, simply going by Deja. And near the end, they even downplayed the Usenet archive searches, trying to turn themselves into some sort of a general consumer site. That effort failed, putting Dejanews in danger of becoming just another dotcom casualty.
In some ways, Google rescued Deja News. The old user interface went away pretty quickly, and Deja News simply became something called Google Groups. Google took their archive, put their own UI over it, and somehow even managed to acquire some older archives along the way, which they added to the collection in 2010.
Subsequent acquisitions like Youtube and Doubleclick proved much more consequential, even transformational. But Deja News was Google’s first. It also shows how Google has changed. The Deja News acquisition was altruistic, something that wouldn’t make Google tons of money, but felt like the right thing to do.
Using the archives today
The old Deja News archive is largely a collection of historical data at this point. I try to remember to use it to try to find out what people were talking about regarding a vintage computer product when it was still fairly new. But it’s not really useful to me, or much of anyone, in solving any modern real world problem. So it’s no surprise that Google has de-emphasized it.
That said, if you navigate to groups.google.com, click on Recent Groups, then click the dropdown to pick “All Groups,” you can still search Usenet archives in much the same way you would have in the late ’90s with Deja News. Don’t ask why the “recent groups” step is necessary, it doesn’t make sense to me either. I think it should just search all groups by default. But I guess it’s not unlike late stage Deja News, when they hid the Usenet archives behind reviews of blenders and washing machines and inkjet printers.
I hadn’t thought about Deja News in a really long time when I started writing this. And that’s really a shame, because it bailed me out of more jams than I can possibly count in the late ’90s. It’s truly one of the lost treasures of the early Internet. But at least it’s not completely lost.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Selling Usenet access has an inherent problem: it is, by nature, a commodity product. Everybody was selling the same core service; they were only differentiated by how many groups they carried, how long they retained posts, and eventually by their web interfaces. (Few people are still using dedicated Usenet news reader software.)
At least one company that is dedicated to Usenet access, Giganews (which also owns Supernews since 2008; they remain separate sites but use the same Usenet database), is still around. They offer more than 20 years of retention of text-only groups and at least five years of binary groups. Some ISPs still offer Usenet access as part of their internet service, but it’s usually outsourced to Giganews. You can also buy access a a standalone product.