Danger, rant ahead: The continued bitching about Google’s purchase of the Deja archive frankly amazes me. I don’t know whether any of the whiners have noticed, but deja.com is gone. So it looks like the site was going to be taken over by Google or by nobody. There’s no question that Google’s search interface needs to get better, but if it doesn’t, what right have they to complain? It’s not like they’re paying Google for the service. And the demands that Google turn over the source code to Deja’s site or the archive itself to a public body are completely laughable. All the ongoing ranting about how the Usenet archive should be a public resource is moronic. Yeah, maybe it should be, and it would be if anyone had bothered to get off their ass and archive all of the postings over the past 5 years or so. Nobody did, though, did they? And in fact, Usenet was used for an awfully long time without anyone archiving any of it. It’s only since Deja started doing it that Usenet users even expected to have such an archive. So, if you’re one of the complainers, get over your sense of entitlement and move on.