subject: Usenet Services And Newsgroup Numbers [print this page] USENET providers, like all other companies, like to use big numbers in their advertisements. While there's nothing deceptive about advertising when you have more of something good than do your competitors, it's up to the consumer to decide whether or not the number being pitched at them is really important or not. There are quite a few different numbers that you'll find in the advertisements of USENET service providers. The number of groups the service provides is one of them.
Hundreds of Thousands
USENET is a huge system. It's also a decentralized system, so all kinds of newsgroups can be created on a server and, if the other servers that network with the server creating them want those newsgroups, they can be shared very easily. The newsgroups on USENET are divided up by topic, not too surprisingly, and there are usually several different subtopics for every topic discussed.
There are 8 major hierarchies that are generally reliable for having good groups within them. They include comp, humanities, misc, news, rec, sci, soc and talk. You'll find many more hierarchies than this, including the alt hierarchy, which is one of the largest.
The highest-quality groups you'll find will generally be found among the Big 8. The other hierarchies, which are doubtless a large portion of the huge number of groups that USENET providers boast, have a lot of low-quality, moderated groups in them.
This means, of course, that a lot of the newsgroups advertised aren't necessarily going to be of any interest to the average user. You can cut down the number of total newsgroups advertised by providers by assessing how many are actually going to be useful. That being said, you're still looking at thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of groups that will be interesting to most users. This means that, even though the number in advertisements may be a bit overstated, there will still be more than enough to keep most people busy.
Other Numbers
Other numbers that you may want to pay attention to more than the number of available groups include the number of connections and the retention times. The number of connections you're allotted will determine, to a large extent, how fast your downloads are if you're using binaries. The retention time is how long the servers keep posts before deleting them. Long retention times are very useful for those who use the USENET system to do research and should be of particular interest to such individuals.
There are literally over 100,000 newsgroups on USENET. That doesn't mean that those groups will be interesting to you, however. One of the really great things about the USENET, however, is that the quality of the newsgroups tends to be very high and the people who participate in them are generally quite knowledgeable. If you're using the USENET system, remember that this system has always thrived on quality and very substantial interactions rather than on providing billions of pages of fluff, as does the Internet, in many cases.
