Google Groups Broke Usenet Links. Here's How to View Them.
Matthew Guay
Donnerstag, 2. Januar 2025
There's a wealth of pre-internet history in old Usenet discussions—but Google Groups linkrot is quickly disappearing them from the internet. Here's how to get them back.
The world wide web came to life in August 1991. The internet came nearly a decade earlier, with the dawn of TCP/IP, and email, that oldest of networked communications, had been around since 1971. Usenet turned those disparate messages and networked connections into the earliest social network, in a way, a place where you could chat with strangers about anything online.
And thanks to Google Groups' early support for Usenet, those threads have been preserved as a unique window into online culture before the internet.
That is, until recently, when Google Groups dropped ongoing support for Usenet and rebuilt its URL scheme. The archives are still there—but old links to Usenet discussions are broken.
Broken, but not lost forever. You'll just need to replace a bit of legacy baggage in the Google Groups Usenet links to resurface the pre-internet discussion.
How to fix broken Google Groups Usenet links
Older Usenet links look something like this (a link I found in a StackExchange discussion about early formatting on computer communications):
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21msg/net.flame/VbghoeOfwyI/E2mClWj2GV8J
That link today redirects you to your Google Groups account—not exactly the content you were looking for. To reach the original Usenet discussion, replace /forum/#21msg/ with /g/, then add a /c/ after the Usenet group name (net.flame in our example) and add a /m/ between the first random character string and the second.
That'll give you a link like the following—one that will actually open the original Usenet discussion:https://groups.google.com/g/net.flame/c/VbghoeOfwyI/m/EQRf347oxw0J
How to search for older Google Groups Usenet discussions
Another trick, if you know a bit of the exact text of the discussion, is to use Google Groups Search to resurface the discussion.
Open Google Groups, click the All Groups tab on the left, then click the search bar to search. There, select All groups and messages, type in your query in quotes, and finally click the Outside my org tab in the search results. With a bit of luck, you should find your Usenet discussion in all its pre-internet glory.
That along with Google Books search and the Internet Archive are the essential tools to start piecing together the history of how today's tech came to be.