okay, remember a long while back when i was talking about cool stuff at microsoft research? i brought up a way to search usenet using msr’s netscan search interface, a very cool labs project…and of course, others have tried to make finding those usenet newsgroups easier, though few took off, and fewer have stood the test of time…but shit, i was blown away when i started toying with the guba overhaul - have you seen it? they now bill themselves as the ‘premier multimedia search site’…

guba stands for ‘gigantic usenet binaries archive’…what’s usenet? per wikipedia , “Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. It was conceived by Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979. Users, sometimes called Usenetters, read and post email-like messages (called “articles”) to a number of distributed newsgroups, categories that resemble bulletin board systems in most respects. The medium is sustained among a large number of servers, which store and forward messages to one another. Usenet is of significant cultural importance in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as “FAQ” and “spam”.“…and per guba, “With over 2 terabytes of new content posted daily…no company, organization, or government controls Usenet…Structurally, Usenet is comprised of thousands of discussion groups called “newsgroups,” which have names like “alt.binaries.multimedia.Comedy.”

…so why use guba? well, for starters, before guba (launched around 1998), there was no simple way to look at all of usenet because no single server looked at all of the content, but the new guba interface allows for very simple and structured meta-search…you can search all of the images, videos, files and text touched, described, posted and discussed across usenet, with real time updates…very, very cool stuff….from guba, “Search within the terabytes of continuously refreshed Usenet images and videos using advanced search utilities to help users find relevant content; Filter video search results by keyword, file size, video duration, and other criteria; Save, Manage, and Update searches automatically according to users’ preferences; Preview video as rolling thumbnails or in an extracted frame format so that users can download only the files they want; and Watch Video in Flash regardless of video format”

…am i missing something, i mean why haven’t the big search engines gone after this already? what the hell is elGoog doing with that dejanews acquisition anyways, besides allowing groups to post into usenet? …this is obviously a backdoor to a lot of pirated content (duh), but any good search engine can dig up this same stuff…hello? you listenin’ elgoog, or yahoo, or microsoft? time to integrate with the main page of your search engines, or - mark my words - watch sites like guba usurp you in a media-centric device-agnostic future of personal web services…(’specially since people are always looking for better ways to find pirated content ;)

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