# Usenet groups? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 30, 2003, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usenet-groups/216131 "2003-11-30T22:58:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Obvious\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Obvious\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Obvious_Guy)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2003, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usenet-groups/216131/1 "2003-11-30T22:58:51Z")
I admittedly dont know much about usenets or newsgroups. What Im looking for is an online usenet to search for groups. I’m aware of Google’s groups, but are there any others? ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [November 30, 2003, 11:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usenet-groups/216131/2 "2003-11-30T23:59:00Z")
There aren’t seperate usenets. There’s just Usenet. Google Groups carries everything, except for binary groups, which are really only good for porn and commercial software. ---
**Author:** ![gentle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/eb8c5e/32.png) [@gentle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gentle)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2003, 12:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/usenet-groups/216131/3 "2003-12-01T00:04:02Z")
Like friedo says, Usenet is a single thing. It’s a distributed discussion board. Like the web, and like email, it’s a technical infrastructure designed to serve a specific purpose. The Usenet network consists of a large number of interconnected servers, called _news servers_. Together they manage a pool of _newsgroups_, named discussion forums where users posts messages. The way this infrastructure works, when someone posts a message to one server, that server forwards the message to other servers so that, eventually, all servers contain a copy of the message. This means that when a user on server A posts a message, a user on server B might not see it until several hours later, at the worst. Usenet, then, is a formalized network of such news servers, and afaik it’s the only one in existence. (It’s perfectly possible to run a private news server, though; some companies run servers for internal communication within a company.) On Usenet, there is a formal hierarchy of newsgroups (comp._, rec._ etc.), and newsgroups are created (or deleted) by a voting process. There’s also an unmoderated space, the alt.\* hierarchy. Some groups are moderated, where all messages are filtered through a pool of administrators, ensuring an optimal signal-to-noise ratio. Most groups are unmoderated, but they’re still subject to spoken and unspoken rules and etiquette. To answer your specific question: Google indexes the Usenet newsgroups and adds a web interface to let you read and post messages. (Traditionally, you use special clients, such as [Thunderbird](http://mozilla.org/thunderbird), to access news servers. Note that most news servers are only open to customers of specific ISPs; if you want to use such a client, you should ask your ISP if they have a news server for you to use.) There are other search engines that index news, [AlltheWeb](http://www.alltheweb.com/?c=news) being one. There are [others](http://www.google.com/search?q=usenet+search). Reading a bit about the Usenet organization and rules is a good idea, as is reading the [rules and FAQs](http://www.faqs.org/faqs/) of the newsgroup you want to participate in. Usenet started out as a great place to talk to like-minded people. The last few years, starting with the onslaught of AOL users, has been slowly suffocating under the weight of moronic users and spam; personally I don’t read news anymore and stick to mailing lists.