After a long period in which Google Groups 2 operated in parallel with the original Google Groups, the company has commited to the revised site, which is now in full beta launch. (Some screens still show the old Groups as a link from the Google home page; the new linkage should flow through the system within a day or so.) The new Google Groups implements similar display and operation properties as Gmail, but with important differences discussed below.

Google Groups is now an Adwords platform, displaying AdWords ads relevant to discussion content, as in Gmail.

The verdict here? Google Groups is a poor release. Read on for the full review…

The new Google Groups embodies two main portions: the Usenet archive, and user-created discussion groups. As such, Google is downplaying the techie nature of Usenet newsgroups; in the promotional e-mail I received, the word “Usenet” was used once, and the word “newsgroup” was never used. The clear intent is to dissolve the barrier between traditional newsgroups and homemade groups, rendering the entire Google Groups domain a single, vast sea of resourceful chatter.

User-created Groups
Homemade groups are meant to compete with Yahoo! Groups, but in fact are severely limited by comparison. There is no file uploading, community calendar, or other non-messaging group features that make Yahoo! users willing to tolerate heinously intrusive advertising. It seems that Google and Yahoo! will offer distinctive choices in their respective Groups products: speed and fluency of conversation (Google) vs. collaborative features slowed by ads (Yahoo!). If Google would put some R&D into non-messaging features, it could produce a Yahoo!-killer in the Groups department. Likewise, if Yahoo! would slim down the advertising load and speed up its Groups as it has sped up Yahoo! Mail, it could trounce Google.

Every homemade group URL uses groups-beta.google.com domain. So what happens when Groups is out of beta? Adding to the confusion, the e-mail addresses for group managers use the googlegroups.com domain.

In my test of group creation, Google added a hyphen to the test group’s name, in both the browser title bar and the URL. The hyphen is not present in the headline bar within the group.

Google offers promotion boxes with cut-and-paste HTML for the creator’s Web site. That’s a nice touch.

Usenet Archive
Google promises that the killer archival lag time which made the old Groups so frustrating has been shortened to near-immediacy. This claim is not born out by my early experience; even in a homemade group, where one might reasonably expect instantaneous posting of messages, there is a lag of minutes. In the Usenet archive, the situation seems to be even worse than in the old Groups, where you could expect an archival lag of three to eight hours. At the time of this post, testing an active newsgroup in both Google Groups and a real-time display of a Comcast server through Outlook Express, I see a lag of 19 hours! During a period of one hour, new posts trickled in to the Groups display, and the 19-hour lag held firm. Needless to say, such latency is intolerable.

The most alarming missing feature in Google Groups is the lack of date-specific searching on the Advanced Search page. If there is one Google index that demands date-enclosed searching, it is the Usenet archive. It existed in the original Groups, and its absence now is inexplicable and unforgivable. Even the pre-2001 Deja News (the foundation of Google Groups) had dated searching. This inadequacy must be corrected immediately.

Usenet sorting is as confusing, or more so, than in the original Groups. Users may sort by the date of the most recent message in the thread, but when doing so Google displays the date of the *original* message of the thread. As a result, the date column (which lacks a time stamp, lamely) is all over the map, appearing unsorted even though it is, in fact, sorted by date and time. Sorting by first message is an option which neatens the date column and more closely mimics an Outlook-style display. However, you cannot explode threads on the sort page; instead, the user must click to a thread page.

Although Google Groups emulates display properties of Gmail to some extent, I miss the conversation-based display by which you see the first few words of each message in a thread, and can expand or contract individual messages, or the entire thread. Indeed, the Gmail arrangement seems better suited to newsgroup participation than most e-mail conversations. Google Groups is clunky on the screen compared to Gmail.

Summary
Shockingly, Google Groups is a poor release that (unlike many Google test projects) deserves its beta standing. The lack of date-sensitive searching flaunts a stunning disregard of the historic value of Usenet. Display properties, while much faster than the original Groups, lack essential Gmail characteristics that seem ideally suited to newsgroup interaction. Sorted displays can be confusing. Archival time lag is, if anything, worse than before, and it was always a serious problem. (This fault might get quickly straightened out as Google’s complete array of servers comes aboard.) Homemade groups lack features that Yahoo! made standard years ago.
On the plus side, Google Groups remains the best free Usenet archive, and user-created groups offer a workable alternative to Yahoo!’s infuriatingly ad-glutted presentation. But these passive traits do not justify a major product release, even in beta, and Google has much work to do before Google Groups is up to speed.