More on Google

Hey,

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from the FAQ:

"7.Why would I want to move the mailing list I manage to Google Groups?

Google Groups is a simple and reliable service for managing and archiving
mailing lists. In addition to basic mailing list functionality, all your
mailing list content will be stored and searchable on the web. Unlike other
free mailing list services, Google Groups offers generous storage limits and
only displays relevant text ads (never banners or pop-ups).

To move your mailing list to Google Groups, create a new group by clicking
"Create a new group" in the menu on the left side of the screen. Complete
step one of the group creation process by naming your group and filling out
the other required information. On step two, add the email addresses of the
people in your group. If you are adding more than 10 members to the group,
click "Invite people in bulk." This option enables you to invite a large
number of people to join your new group. Copying and pasting and existing
list of email addresses into this form is one easy way of moving large groups
to Google Groups. Click "Invite these people" and invitations to join your
group will be sent out momentarily. "
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So the point I want to make is this: Yahoo's search feature *really sucks*.
Yes, it would be easier to stay at Yahoo, but the archive will just get
larger and larger and larger and harder and harder and harder to search.

For those of you who don't know how to search on Yahoo, give it a try, and
you'll see how disgustingly annoying it is. It crawls through only a couple
of hundred messages at a time, and not the entire history of the archive.
This means that in order to find what you're looking for, you have to have a
rough idea of when it occurred, then look up a message number close to that
date in the archive, and then manually *crawl* through the archive a couple
hundred at a time. If you go the *wrong* direction in time, you're SOL, If
you don't know *when* the post occurredm you're alos SOL.

Even with my automated script, you're SOL: Yahoo will deny access for at least
half a day to any IP it determines makes to many 'html GET' requests: I know
because when I tested my script, I got booted from yahoogroups for a half a
day. In searching the internet for what happened to me, I found out that
Yahoo's (unstated) policy is to shut people down for a day, but I've heard of
cases being a week or more.

Not good.

I'm saying adamantly that we should leave....Google's interface is cleaner and
less pop-uppey anyway, and esp. if you ever use the web interface, they never
put an advertisement between you and the message you want to see. Plus,
Google's topics are *threaded*:

Robert Walker and a couple of others have suggested proprietary solutions. I
will not be involved with that at all. This should be free.....

In short:

1) Google is searchable over it's entire history, unlike the slice based
search of Yahoo.

2) Google is cleaner.

3) Google is threaded.

4) Google don't ever have banner ads or popups like Yahoo, or those who
occasionally (like I do) use the web interface, for either reading archival
stuff, or for being at remote computers.

I strongly encourage people to join, if you haven't already:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/non12comp/

and cross post there so we can compare which interface on average gives us
faster delivery.

Best,
--
Aaron Krister Johnson
http://www.dividebypi.com
http://www.akjmusic.com