In response to a Wired article that ran yesterday, Google is fixing its archives of Usenet posts, one of the richest and oldest repositories of user-generated content ever to exist online.

For those of you under the age of 30, Usenet began in 1979 in Chapel Hill as a collection of newsgroups. In the years that followed, Internet history unfolded, jargon was coined, and lore was created in these discussions. In 2001, Google acquired two Usenet archives comprising 700 million posts and failed to index them in any meaningful way. As of today, that wrong is being righted.

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In the past, searching Usenet posts archived in Google Groups often yielded few or no results. For example, this recent discussion thread is all about the brokenness of Google's Usenet archives and search capabilities.

"None of my posts are showing up (using advanced search, trying email and name in the author field, even limiting the date range to the right years)," wrote one user.

Noting that Google's Usenet search "often... returns no results for queries which obviously shouldn't," another