Perhaps the posts were never there. Why, it seems strange to argue otherwise, when all the evidence points to their non-existence.
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Oh come on. Who can even remember events of ten years ago?
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I was hoping there’d never be a reason for me to swtich to bing or duckduckgo. I guess now there’s a reason.
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The search for their Usenet archives went through a completely broken phase years ago. I haven’t checked in a while to see if they ever fixed it.
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They did a pretty good job of this for a while after they acquired DejaNews. I could easily find posts I made back in the early 1990s to various UseNet groups.
But now all of the Deja stuff they acquired is all wrapped up in Google Groups fuckery and is a million times worse than it used to be.
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Here’s a fun experiment - should it come up in conversation with family and/or friends then tell them you don’t use google but duckduckgo, see if they get a look on their faces as if a martian just landed in front of them. Then as a follow-up try convincing them to switch from their G-god to something like duckduckgo… 
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Just recently I’ve come to believe that Google has pulled a bait and switch, and now we’re all screwed. See, I remember being able to use Google to actually find things on the web – esoteric things, interesting things, unmonetized things. Now, pretty much all I can find is stuff to buy or lowest-common denominator information. If I’m not looking to spend some money, I pretty much can’t find anything. And the alternatives don’t seem to be much better (ok, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track, which is nice, but the search results aren’t better).
I used to really like the internet. There were so many cool things out there! And they may still be out there, but damned if I can find them.
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Merely an illusion.
Nondualism in action, I like it!
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I dunno. I am a techie and have witnessed plenty of things disappear and become unobtainable.
Enough that articles claiming that old posts, or even leaked nude photos* are on the internet Forever I just assume are hyperbole because nobody has ever really looked into it.
*Unless you are really famous of course. It will take longer then.
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I have ages of posts on Slashdot that are gone gone gone. A ton of specific bush-era shenanigans I’ve searched for are gone. I suppose there’s no possible niche for a search engine that finds stuff older than 5 years old, especially since you can’t go back in time to get it.
Is the NSA our only hope? #OpenTheNSADatabase
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Oh please. Let them forget. Just… forget.
Forget what? I have no idea what you are talking about. Go away!
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Interestingly, when I recently googled for information about the current state of PC hardware, Google presented me with posts and articles from 2003 to 2012. That wasn’t terribly useful.
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This only means Google is doomed to repeat the early web.
Are you saying this could… Snowball… Comrade? 
(I thought that was Trotsky missing there)
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Google’s original mission statement was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Seems more likely this is a glitch (or just reflecting those sites being orphaned) than actually google ‘forgetting’. It doesn’t actually actually benefit google to forget those sites because the internet was a lot smaller back then. Eliminating all the pre-2008 webpages only saves Google about 10% of its space at most.
I started using Duckduckgo a few years ago to avoid Google tracking and have not missed Google at all… It is nice to know that they are actually better. Still, that name…
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I too used to used Yahoo (groups esp.) but they repeatedly and often fucked up everything they touched. ALL my groups were evaporated. Yahoo mail turned into a giant ad forum with a postage stamp size area for actual ‘mail’. Everything about Yahell became totally screwed. Be thankful that what you need them for is obscure enough that they have not gotten around to fucking it all up. But, give them time.
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