Google's New Deja.com Not Like the Old

S A N   F R A N C I S C O, Feb. 15, 2001 -- Google Inc. took over Deja.com’s online

discussion service, adding more than 500 million wide-ranging

messages to one of the Web’s most extensive search engines.

Financial terms between the privately held companies weren’t

disclosed.

In 1995, Deja — originally known as Dejanews — created a quickand easy way to read and post messages on an online forum, known asUsenet, which doesn’t use the same computer code that powers theWorld Wide Web.

While opening up Usenet’s discussion boards to Web browsers, NewYork-based Deja also created an archive of all the messages postedin the newsgroups. Deja’s technology allows Web surfers to performtopical searches to focus on specific discussion threads.

The Usenet messages delve into diverse topics, ranging fromdiscussions on rocket science to popular culture.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google views the addition of theDeja archives as another significant step toward creating aone-stop source for online information.

Since it started in 1998, Google has developed one of theworld’s most popular search engines, using a method that siftsthrough more than 1.3 billion Web pages to list results based onthe relevancy to the search request.

Searching the Usenet message boards “is a way to look upinformation and see what people are saying about certain thingswithout dealing with all the commercial aspects of the Web,” saidGoogle President Sergey Brin.

The Deja database is so large that only the past six months ofmessages are now available through Google at groups.google.com.

By the end of May, the rest of the archives should betransferred to Google’s database and visitors should be able topost messages to the discussions, Brin said.

Deja has been on the ropes for months. The company laid offone-third of its work force in September and in December sold itscomparison shopping site to Half.com, which is owned by eBay. Inthe process, Deja’s payroll shrank from about 140 employees inSeptember to 20 today.

None of Deja’s remaining workers are guaranteed jobs withGoogle, which has slightly more than 100 employees. Google willclose Deja’s technology hub in Austin, Texas, by the end of thisweek.

Deja aborted a long-delayed initial public offering of stocklast June. The company had lost $19.5 million from its inceptionthrough March 1999, the last time that it disclosed its financialresults.