Last year, I wrote a column about the loss of the Internets collective memory, especially when it came to older Usenet postings.
At the time that Google.com purchased Deja.coms Usenet archive, it was searchable only to early 1999.
Well, it took a little while, but Google has done right by Usenet, not only in restoring all of Dejas previously archived newsgroup postings but also in actively seeking out older Usenet postings, many of which were on CDs, disks and tapes.
This work paid off, and, recently, Google relaunched its Usenet search service with postings going back 20 years.
Using the new service at groups.google.com to search for old but useful information (as well as for all my own old postings) is as easy as ever, and good advanced features make it easy to narrow the results.
Google has also included a nice timeline feature that has many key first posts, including the first Usenet mention of Y2K and Tim Berners-Lees announcement of the World Wide Web.