Re: lynx-dev www.deja.com, how to use via lynx?

[Kim DeVaughn]

On Wed, Nov 24, 1999, David Combs (address@hidden) said:
|
| I haven't tried deja in a few years -- nowadays there is so much
| junk on the page, ads, choices, etc, etc --
|
| Has anyone written down a simple set of steps for using
| it?
|
| I know this is stupid to ask, but I find they've made deja
| vastly more difficult than years ago.

There are a number of alternate "front-end" pages to the search
engine that are vastly superior to deja's own.  There are also
a number of perl/etc based tools that can also be very helpful
when searching ... especially when combined with the normal UNIX
text handling utilities (eg, grep, sed, awk, etc).

Here's a link to a page on Cameron Laird's site, which provides
links to several of these tools and pages:

Linkname: Cameron Laird's personal notes on DejaNews
URL: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/comp.infosystems.search/dejanews.html

Excerpt:

 > DejaNews Digesters
 >
 >    Several people have prepared front ends to DN's search facilities,
 >    generally to scrub advertising and other noise from the results.
 >    Several are designed for local hosting. Most are command-line
 >    utilities coded in Perl. These include
 >      * [1]Dejaview,
 >      * Industrial Softworks' [2]Dejafilter,
 >      * Neelakantan Krishnaswami's [3]DejaGrabber.py (written in Python),
 >      * the [4]Ija command line browser for dejanews, which Kim DeVaughn
 >        [5]describes for lynx developers, and
 >      * [6]DejaSearch.
 >
 >    [7]Re:News apparently is a "Newsreader that searches for articles in
 >    Usenet newsgroups", that is, a commercial front-end to the Deja
 >    data-store.
 >
 >    There are also a few Web sites which wrap DejaNews; that is, they
 >    offer superior interfaces for searching, and/or display results more
 >    conveniently. The raw work of searching they continue to hand off to
 >    DejaNews, for they don't maintain their own [8]archives. The examples
 >    I know in this category are
 >      * marco's lynx-oriented [9]Search DejaNews,
 >      * Jeremy Nixon's [10]Deja Power Search (is [11]this a mirror of it?)
 >        and
 >      * Matt Kruse's [12]Internet Search.

I've used Ija and DejaSearch on my ISP shell account, and commonly use
Jeremy Nixon's front-end page when accessing deja.  All are useful tools
to add to your search toolkit.

/kim

=======================================================================
"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
                                      --Cleon I