Deja News
More info
- Released
- 1995–2001
- Type
- Searchable Usenet archive
- Successor
- Google Groups
The search engine that turned Usenet into a permanent record, to many people's surprise and some people's horror.
Deja News launched in 1995 and indexed Usenet posts so anyone could search them on the web. Articles used to expire off servers after days or weeks; suddenly you could look up what someone had written in the alt. groups years earlier. Digging up a candidate's old posts before the interview predates social media by a decade.
The company tried to broaden into consumer reviews as Deja.com and in 2001 sold the archive to Google, which turned it into Google Groups and added older tapes going back to 1981. Google stopped accepting and peering Usenet traffic in February 2024, so the archive is still standing but the network around it has been unplugged.