On 2/20/2024 10:21 AM, Jinny Wallerstedt wrote:

> Questions: Is Narkive the best/only way to visit all past Soc.medieval
> discussions on Google Groups? Is there a search function there that I’m
> missing?

It is still unclear how Google Groups is going to manage the soc.gen.med
archive there. There may be a more convenient search function there, but
we will have to see what they do.

> Will the inactive group/archive come up in a Google search only as Narkive?

The termination notice explicitly states that the material in Google
Groups will continue to be available, and since the Google Groups hits
come up on a Google search now, they should continue to do so, in some
form, but time will tell.

For either of these approaches, the best way to access the material
would seem to be a Google Advanced search:

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

for which you specify the 'site or domain:' parameter as either of the
following:

https://soc.genealogy.medieval.narkive.com/
https://groups.google.com/g/soc.genealogy.medieval/

When you get your returned results, you can further limit them by date
using the Tools drop-down in the upper right of the results page, but
when I just tried this with the Narkive site specified it was giving me
flaky results, not showing a 6-month-old post with a 'past year' limited
search but showing it from a search without a date limit.

> Is there a way that directions for accessing the migrated group can come
> up in a Google Search of “medieval genealogy,” for example, or be added
> to Narkive page? Forgive me if more tech-sophisticated others already
> know that “no” is the basic answer.

In short, no.

Narkive is a one-person catch-and-host operation that does not include
any group-specific instructions. Even the general Usenet information
they have (which do not go into the necessary level of detail) seem to
be out of date/not maintained, so I think adding any group-specific
information is a non-starter.

As to it coming up on a Google search, getting a page to be high in a
returned search listing is an art that consultants get paid money to try
to bring about, and which Google tries just as hard to make as opaque as
possible to keep commercial interests from 'gaming the algorithm'.
Anything that can be done can only be done on a web page that one
personally controls, and having it on just some random web host will
already give it a lower priority than, for example, Google Groups has.
(This is why I reposted the same instructions here again under a
different header, hoping to increase search terms that might result in a
Google Search return. (I will probably do it again, in the final hours,
again with a different header, with the same goal in mind.)

taf

On 2/17/2024 10:18 AM, Enno Borgsteede wrote:
> Op 17-02-2024 om 15:02 schreef Scott Swanson:
>
>> Is there a way of asking the server to download messages from further
>> back, say, from the middle of 2022?
>
> I don't know a direct way, but there might be a trick, which is that you
> unsubscribe in Thunderbird, and then subscribe again. In that case, next
> time you download message headers, Thunderbird will tell you how many
> message headers there are, and ask you if you want to download all, or a
> specified number, like 500.
>
> I see no way to download headers from a specific date, but that may be
> possible with another client, if the protocol allows that.
>
> OTOH, as long as Google provides newsgroup access, you can search their
> archives too.
>
> Enno
>
It turns out that Enno’s trick works perfectly. I unsubscribed and
resubscribed and downloaded 3000 headers which took me back 5 December
2022; did it again and downloaded 3200 headers which took me back to 21
October 2022. The only quirk I can see is that on long chains, only the
first 100 messages appear. One chain I looked at has 156 contributions
yet I could only see the first 100. Not sure whether there another
trick to see the remaining 56.

Scott.