Instead of having pre-set groups for newsgroup postings, if you wish to news news posts, you input a set of keywords and your computer get's back 'groups' which are set up as posts ranked "relevan" to your query. You create a few of these and you get the equivalent of dynamic newsgroups.-- triptych, Jun 12 2000 Newsgroup article pool http://www.jps.net/antons/instead.txtA discussion of at least two alternatives to usenet that suggest ideas similar to this. [clynne, Jun 12 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004] Google Groups http://groups.google.com/Search facility for USENET. [egnor, Jun 12 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004] Unison www.panic.com/unisonBest. Newsreader. Ever. [Linuxthess, Oct 04 2004] Newzbin http://www.halfbake...dea/www.newzbin.comNZB's. 'nuff said. [Linuxthess, Oct 04 2004] I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot, having grappled with several newsreaders and found none of them entirely satisfactory. The big problem, as I see it, as that you'd require some kind of back-end process to trawl and organise all the newsposts, taking into account things like multiple newsservers, spam posts and flames.
An idea I have for my ultimate newsreader involves having a list of conversations and mapping them in some way to bring those that you've read or responded to 'closer'.-- MonTemplar, Sep 30 2000 Lots of people (myself included) go through a phase of wanting this (see also: clynne's link). They almost always decide it's a bad idea eventually.
Newsgroups aren't just content categorization; they define communities. People post to a particular newsgroup, not necessarily because their content is topical, but because they're part of that newsgroup community. They know, roughly, the set of people who will read and/or reply to their post.
Otherwise, you might as well just post a Web page somewhere and let the search engines pick it up. People do that, too, of course, but it's not a newsgroup; there's no conversation, there's no community.
In any case, if you want to search USENET, there are facilities available for the purpose (see my link).-- egnor, Apr 19 2001 random, halfbakery