Finding, searching and utilizing Usenet newsgroups is often overlooked when conducting research on the Internet. Even savvy searchers using search engines like AltaVista or Northern Light, directories like Findlaw or Yahoo!, and even megasites like Cornell's Legal Information Institute or the federal government's GPO Access, but who are not searching Usenet, are missing a vital source unique to the Internet.

This article will discuss techniques and options for searching Usenet. Reading or accessing Usenet newsgroups through a newsreader is not addressed here. This is usually accomplished through your email program provided by your Internet service provider.

Internet Newgroups
Internet newsgroups, electronic bulletin boards or IDG's (Internet discussion groups) are all synonymous with Usenet newsgroups. Simply stated, Usenet newsgroups, or Usenet, are public on-line conversations divided into a wide variety of topics. According to a recent article in the New York Times, there are nearly 45,000 newsgroups. The term is somewhat misleading, since these conversations aren't necessarily "news." News is covered, but this is only a small part of Usenet's universe.

What type of discussion might you encounter? Computer users reading a particular "thread" - a series of messages on the same subject - may find solutions to bugs or glitches with software; health professionals might read messages discussing a new drug on the market; and attorneys could view a message by an expert who may be testifying for the opposition. This is assuming the expert uses Usenet and posts messages. Even if you have never participated in a Usenet discussion, by posting a question, offering an opinion, or replying to a query, you should know how to find a newsgroup by topic and be able to search across all newsgroups.

Where to Look
Where can you search Usenet? DejaNews (recently relaunched as Deja) originally had as its primary focus newsgroup searching. The focus has now shifted to merchandising, but you can still search newsgroups. Of course, the term newsgroup is no longer used at Deja; now they're called "discussions."

After accessing the site, www.deja.com, you can enter your search terms from this first screen, or you can browse newsgroups by one of the subjects listed on the left portion of the home page. In addition, you can search from the advanced search screen, which is called power search. I always like to see all the search options available, so I recommend using the power search page. Generally, when you use any search site for the first time, it is a good idea to look at the help pages. Deja is no different. Consider the search examples and suggestions.

Let us try a couple of sample searches. Access the power search screen at deja.com. As a search example, say you are interested in purchasing Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech-recognition software product. Before you buy, you want to see if anyone has discussed it.

You enter your search in the keywords box, Dragon Naturally Speaking. You get about 7,000 matches. A lot of the results are advertisements for the product. To reduce the number of results, confine the results to "legal lists." Hopefully this is where you would find attorneys discussing the product.

Limiting the Lists
You can limit your results to a particular type of list by entering the term(s) between asterisks, or if you know the complete forum name enter it in the forum field. The asterisks surrounding the term function as a wildcard. (Forum is another word for a newsgroup.)

In our case, we don't know what forums to search, so our search is: *legal*. Leave your keywords as entered in the first search and run your search again. I received 35 matches this time. The messages were from two forums: trial.misc.legal.software, and corelsupport.wordperfectsuite-legal. One of the posts requested opinions regarding purchasing Dragon Systems and there are a number of replies. Another thread of messages involves someone with a problem with Suite 8 and Win98.

You do not have to read every message or post, as you usually can tell from the subject line what the message is about. Options for viewing your results are provided by Deja. After selecting and reading a message, you have the options of viewing messages "next in search," "previous in search," "next in thread" or "previous in thread." You don't have to click back to your list and then select another message. This saves some steps.

Expert Searches
You also may want to search for an expert to see if the individual has participated in Usenet. Searching by name is tricky, but you have two options. First you can search your expert in the author field. The problem is you have to know or guess the individual's login name. This is different from an email address. My login, for example, is first initial and last name, "cherz." Again the help page for power search explains how to run an author search. The example used by Deja for the author field is Harley Hahn. Mr. Hahn wrote The Internet Complete Reference.

In this case Mr. Hahn's login is "harley." To search for messages posted by Mr. Hahn, you would enter the login name followed by the symbol, then an asterisk, which functions as a wildcard - harley*. If you were guessing, you might try hhahn* or hahn* or then maybe you would try the correct one, harley*. As you can see, with a common name it can be difficult. In addition, not everyone uses his or her own name as a login name.

The second search option would be searching an expert's name free-text in the keywords' box. This search would look for the name anywhere in a Usenet message post. For someone famous this may be successful. Try this author search. Enter harley* in the author field. I also entered Internet in the keyword box. I received 823 matches. All of the results have "harley" as part of the poster's message. In looking at a number of the results pages however, I did not see Harley Hahn. So you can see this a trickier search to run and return relevant results. An author search alone may not be the best search, but try using it in combination with keywords.

Other Sites
Deja is not the only site where you can search Usenet. AltaVista, www.altavista.com, a search engine, allows you to search Usenet as well. From the homepage at AltaVista, select Usenet. It is listed under "Useful Tools." Searching Usenet at AltaVista only searches messages posted to Usenet in the previous two weeks. Again, to limit your search you should look at the help page for Usenet. Here you can limit the subject matter by entering your search as subject: Dragon Naturally Speaking.

A number of other search engines also permit you to search newsgroups but it looks like they are powered by Deja, meaning they use the Deja search software, so essentially it will be the same as searching Deja.

Conclusion
This online newsgroup community, global in scope, discussing every conceivable topic is a vast resource, and one you should tap into. As with anything you find on the Internet, you need to evaluate the information from Usenet. How old is the post? What are the credentials of the author? Is someone trying to sell something? These are questions you need to ask concerning the information you find.

If you have only been searching the Internet for Web pages, I hope you will now expand your search to include Usenet.