On Wed, Nov 24, 1999, David Combs ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) said:
|
| I haven't tried deja in a few years -- nowadays there is so much
| junk on the page, ads, choices, etc, etc --
|
| Has anyone written down a simple set of steps for using
| it?
|
| I know this is stupid to ask, but I find they've made deja
| vastly more difficult than years ago.
There are a number of alternate "front-end" pages to the search
engine that are vastly superior to deja's own. There are also
a number of perl/etc based tools that can also be very helpful
when searching ... especially when combined with the normal UNIX
text handling utilities (eg, grep, sed, awk, etc).
Here's a link to a page on Cameron Laird's site, which provides
links to several of these tools and pages:
Linkname: Cameron Laird's personal notes on DejaNews
URL: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/comp.infosystems.search/dejanews.html
Excerpt:
> DejaNews Digesters
>
> Several people have prepared front ends to DN's search facilities,
> generally to scrub advertising and other noise from the results.
> Several are designed for local hosting. Most are command-line
> utilities coded in Perl. These include
> * [1]Dejaview,
> * Industrial Softworks' [2]Dejafilter,
> * Neelakantan Krishnaswami's [3]DejaGrabber.py (written in Python),
> * the [4]Ija command line browser for dejanews, which Kim DeVaughn
> [5]describes for lynx developers, and
> * [6]DejaSearch.
>
> [7]Re:News apparently is a "Newsreader that searches for articles in
> Usenet newsgroups", that is, a commercial front-end to the Deja
> data-store.
>
> There are also a few Web sites which wrap DejaNews; that is, they
> offer superior interfaces for searching, and/or display results more
> conveniently. The raw work of searching they continue to hand off to
> DejaNews, for they don't maintain their own [8]archives. The examples
> I know in this category are
> * marco's lynx-oriented [9]Search DejaNews,
> * Jeremy Nixon's [10]Deja Power Search (is [11]this a mirror of it?)
> and
> * Matt Kruse's [12]Internet Search.
I've used Ija and DejaSearch on my ISP shell account, and commonly use
Jeremy Nixon's front-end page when accessing deja. All are useful tools
to add to your search toolkit.
/kim
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"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
--Cleon I
