Sherlock Plugin to search Google Groups for Usenet news postings


Maintained by David A. Clunie dclunie@dclunie.com.

Last updated: Tue May 08 19:01:21 EDT 2001

People are always asking where to get old postings from the newsgroups and since Google bought DejaNews' archive and has now brought on line all the postings since 1995 this is easy. To make it even easier for Mac users, here is a Sherlock plugin to do the searching.

The plugin for Sherlock (as shipped with MacOS 9) can be downloaded in BinHex form from here. Un-binhex the plugin and then drag it to the System folder and it will be installed in the Internet channel (you can manually drag it elsewhere in the "System:Internet Search Sites" folder if you like).

With no specific arguments it will search all newsgroups which is pretty useless, so you can qualify it with specific arguments, as in the following example:

	group:comp.protocols.dicom insubject:tag author:clunie

The operators to use should be documented at http://groups.google.com/help/operators.html but they don't seem to be (yet).

How to write a plugin is documented at http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1141.html; you will see if you look at the ".src" file with a text editor that this is not rocket science.