dlzc wrote:
Dear Robert Clark:

On May 10, 10:08 am, Robert Clark wrote:
The take over by Google of the Usenet archive was
first seen as a godsend. However, its horrendous
search function on past and current Usenet posts
has lead many Usenet readers to wish Google
would just give up the job to someone who actually
wants to do it.

It works fine from their "Advanced Search" dialog screen.
http://groups.google.com/groups/adva...ups.google.com

It is the asymmetric search interfaces, and search performance /
behavior, that is maddening.


Advanced dialogue screen doesn't exactly work fine. If you select search
on a specific author and date range it generates a command line syntax
that is usually invalid if you return to advanced search. eg

author:Martin author:Brown

mutates to

g:authorBrown author:Martin

and Google helpfully offers to "correct" it to

g:arthur Brown author:Martin

And under some circumstances - I think on the first search in a session
where no results are returned the date range is reset to current.

I have not seen it fail on modern posts by keyword at all.
I blame user error.

Regards,
Martin Brown