response 32 of 123:

Jun 12 03:13 UTC 2000

Cmcgee writes in #6, " In fact, part of my willingness to post on Grex has been
premised on the idea
 that no one could find my thoughts unless they found Grex first and also were
 interested enough to join a conference."

Yes.  Me too.  I do recognize that Grex is already, as lots of people have been
pointing out recently, a "public forum."  But it is also a community, and I
think that making it *more* public in this manner would be a big mistake.  So
much of what is posted here is not just factual information but personal
reflections, life stories, emotions... I think that making it easier to find
all this via a search would do far more harm than good.

response 34 of 123:

Jun 12 17:10 UTC 2000

I'd love to see a Grex-specific search engine, so that I could search 
for information I've seen people enter before on Grex.

response 36 of 123:

Jun 12 22:01 UTC 2000

We could run the 'glimpse' search engine here, if we have the disk
space.  (Glimpse builds rather large index files.)

response 38 of 123:

Jun 13 15:20 UTC 2000

Is disk space really that much of an obstacle?  Why?

response 40 of 123:

Jun 14 02:22 UTC 2000

Re #38, 39 - I (my own opinion, not reflective of Grex Policy, or the 
opinions of anyone who knows what they're talking about) would like to 
be able to search, using indexed searchers or whatever, and think that 
this could probably be done without a need to add additional disk.  
However, I'm sure that pfv would be willing to post a long list of 
eggdroppings that he sees as an obstacle to disk space. (this is not an 
invitation)

response 42 of 123:

Jun 14 06:52 UTC 2000

PicoSpan didn't try to index anything because (1) in 1983 disk space was
much more expensive, (2) it's surprisingly hard (and somewhat slower) to
properly update a dynamically allocated data with variable sized text
and keep information in several different places in sync, even in the
face of problems like an untimely process death, system crash, or
hardware (ie, disk) mis-behavior.

The other problem with indexed text is, um, how *do* you index english
text so that it's possible to get quick results, do various sorts of
wildcard searches, and not consume gobs of disk or CPU?  I've been kind
of curious just how the web search engines tackle these problems, but
haven't seen any good description.

response 44 of 123:

Jun 14 16:42 UTC 2000

Or try the book _Managing Gigabytes_, by Witten, Moffat, and Bell
(Morgan Kaufmann 1999).

response 46 of 123:

Jun 16 13:10 UTC 2000

Hm, it seems I was secretary then and took the 11-22-93 Board minutes.
Well, looking up the minutes, it appears that someone claiming to be
John Hofmann and have login 'freedog' was among the attendees...

As for what people will want to look up, I'd guess topics would be
a major one.  For example, I might be in the market for a new car
and remember that there was a discussion on the relative merits
of various local dealers a while back.  Can't remember if it was
in the Agora or Cars or Consumers conference, or just when the
discussion took place.  Being able to search across all of Grex's
conferences on key words and phrases like "cars", "dealerships",
and "Ann Arbor" would help me track it down.

response 48 of 123:

Jun 16 20:21 UTC 2000

It is quite different, and would serve different purposes.  

If people have qualms about across-the-board access to Grex
discussions by web search engines, then I think it would be
reasonable to make it an option on a per-conference basis, with
the decision left up to the conference participants.  

A big plus for making some Grex discussion web-searchable is that it
could make Grex more visible on the web and draw in more participants.
This might help counter the "same people always saying the same stuff"
syndrome, and could be quite healthy for Grex.

response 50 of 123:

Jun 18 12:26 UTC 2000

I very much agree with John's #48.  

It seems like folks want Grex to offer the privacy of a small
invitation-only club yet they complain about how the discussions
are predictable with the same folks rehashing the same topics.

I'd like to see all of Grex indexed and searchable on the Web.

response 52 of 123:

Jun 18 19:18 UTC 2000

This proposal has potentially interesting interactions with the arguments
over the "scribble" command, in that Grex conference responses which are 
potential torts would be much more widely distributed, and much more 
likely to be acted upon; and the most immediate demand in such an action
is going to be for the material to be removed from Grex.
 
Let's take a particular recent example.  If the current Agora gets indexed,
anyone who *ever* searches for the name of a certain grocery store chain
is going to turn up the allegation of unfair labor practices in this
Agora conference.
The store could quite reasonably conclude that this is an ongoing 
libel and demand that the material be removed, and they have the resources
to file a lawsuit about it.

Here's another recent example.  We had a short-lived participant in the 
music conference who entered a long list of MP3 files he was offering
to trade.  I waffled on removing the item -- after all, whether the exchange
of such information as a directory of files is illegal is one of the key
issues in the Napster lawsuit.  And then the item spawned the best discussion
in the music conference in ages, about the legal, ethical and business 
implications of the MP3 scene.  

I figure that the initial list of Mp3 files probably does little to no 
harm: I'm not even sure the guy who posted it left any way for anyone to 
find him.  But I'm sure the music industry cruises the web looking for 
people trading MP3 files; if we index this item, I would expect to hear 
from their lawyers demanding the removal of this text.

response 54 of 123:

Jun 18 20:28 UTC 2000

Joe is right on this.  Any decision to index items on this system should be
strictly limited to items entered after a clearly and publicy-announced date,
and notice of this indexing should appear as permanent part of either the MOTD
or on BBS startup.

response 56 of 123:

Jun 29 01:00 UTC 2000

I always held the whole idea of a web interface to be asking for trouble,
so you can guess my opinion here.