Does Usenet News Alerts exist?

June 3, 2004 5:39 PM

Does anyone know of a free service like Google News alerts, only for Usenet? Filtering in newsreaders won't do: I need alerts from across all available groups; I can't very well subscribe to 40,000 newsgroups and then filter on the client side. If the results came in RSS form, that would be fine, too. Right now, my best option seems to be to save searches at Google Groups to a browser bookmark group.
posted by Mo Nickels to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

GoogleGroups2beta has per-newsgroup Atom feeds, though it's so cleverly buried it's a wonder anyone ever discovered this. You can also setup Google WebAlerts to watch for new results for specific searches. Try using a site:groups.google.com specifier to limit the results.

Your bookmarking solution sounds pretty good too, though it'd be up to you to sort out what's new/different.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 7:24 PM on June 3, 2004

Well, at 50 cents per week, its close to free, and an amazing service: http://www.newzbin.com
posted by ac at 7:40 PM on June 3, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, nakedcodemonkey, but I've already looked and rejected both of those as unsuitable. WebAlerts is awful, anyway, for anything. Signing up for it is like saying, "Please shit in my mailbox." Also--please don't take this the wrong way--but is site:groups.google.com a secret to anyone?

Newsbin looks like it might be exactly what I want.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:33 PM on June 3, 2004

Response by poster: PS: Thanks ac.
posted by Mo Nickels at 8:33 PM on June 3, 2004

Response by poster: I checked out Newzbin. Unfortunately, it offers only a small subset of newsgroups, and appears to be targeted at people who want to download binary files, which is not what I am after.

Any other recommendations would be welcome.
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:28 AM on June 4, 2004

site:groups.google.com isn't going to work, google is smart enough not the index their news feed for their web search. If you have the necessary skills, hack up a perl script that does searches sorted by date and mails you if new results get added. Shouldn't be too much work.
posted by fvw at 7:54 AM on June 4, 2004