Tracking newsgroups

People who used the Net in the early days often crawled around newsgroups, looking for interesting discussions. Back then you needed to use group readers to find and look at topics.

With Google Groups, that searching comes right off your Web browser. One handy way to track the world of newsgroups — and yes, it’s still a thriving segment of the Web — is using Google’s groups category link.

Go to groups.google.com and look for the link at the center bottom reading Browse All Group Categories.

That opens a page that’s something like a nice encyclopedia, offering a subject listing of the roughly 10,000 Google newsgroups. Handy when you need to go digging for relevant information.

Another option is to browse the Activity link for newsgroups. That opens a page with groups ranked by High, Medium and Low activity.

Diving down deeper, you can find out which newsgroups, over the past month, have had the most activity. They are (no surprise), in order of activity: groups devoted to Sex, Sexuality, People, Recreation, and the Internet.