I'm Feeling Lucky by Edwards Douglas

Author:Edwards, Douglas [Edwards, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-06-19T14:00:00+00:00

Post Apocalypse

It was November 2000 when I first learned that Google was buying another company. The acquisition, code-named "Yogi," was an online archive of Usenet posts known as Deja News. We would announce the deal the following February.

If you're a Usenet aficionado, you'll probably take issue with what I say about it here, so why not skip the next paragraph and avoid the heartburn? Of course you won't. If you like Usenet, you live for heartburn.

In a nutshell, Usenet is a computer network that preceded the World Wide Web. Founded in 1980, it provided a place for academics and scientists to share information with colleagues by posting messages in newsgroups on an electronic bulletin board. Newsgroups were divided into subject categories such as "comp." for computers or "sci." for science or "rec." for recreation. The name coming after the period indicated the subgroup, as in "sci.research.AIDS." Over time, Usenet devolved from its noble purpose to reflect the common concerns and issues of our times, with groups like "rec.arts.movies.slasher" and an explosion in binary files, which contained encoded software, music, and images since reposted on websites requiring a credit card and proof of age. Moreover, the nature of the dialogue on Usenet changed from dry academic discussions to heated polemics on politics and religion and a multitude of other contentious issues, giving birth to such terms as "flame mail" and "trolling."

Deja News was home to a continuously updated archive of five hundred million of these posts going back to 1995, including such classics as the announcement of AltaVista's launch and the first mention of Google. Unfortunately, Deja News could no longer afford to maintain the service. In fact, it couldn't even provide access to all the data it had archived. Desperate, it came to Google, seeking a way to keep their data from sinking forever into obscurity. Recognizing the value of the content, Larry and Sergey threw them a lifeline, offering to take the archive, clean it up, make it more searchable, and host it going forward. Google already had plans to launch its own Usenet site at groups.google.com, so the timing was fortuitous. Still, it was an act of mercy and everyone involved knew it.

The handoff happened quickly—too quickly for Google to do much more than launch a stopgap service based on a separate, recently acquired archive of Usenet posts, while our engineers organized the Deja data and built a better system to deliver it. The interim site wouldn't contain all the posts back to 1995 as Deja's had: it would only offer posts dating back a year. Users wouldn't be able to browse through different groups (though they could search them) or post new messages. Most significantly, they wouldn't be able to "nuke" or remove posts they had already written, even if they had deleted them previously (Deja had suppressed display of deleted comments, but never actually expunged them from the old database). Some Deja users were about to rediscover the offensive and embarrassing notes they had written while angry or drunk, thought twice about, and destroyed.

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