[5] The Deja News Research Service was an archive of messages posted to Usenet discussion groups, started in March 1995[6] by Steve Madere in Austin, Texas.

Its search engine capabilities won the service acclaim, generated controversy, and significantly changed the perceived nature of online discussion.

[This paragraph needs citation(s)] While archives of Usenet discussions had been kept for as long as the medium existed, Deja News offered a novel combination of features.

It was available to the general public, provided a simple World Wide Web user interface, allowed searches across all archived newsgroups, returned immediate results, and retained messages indefinitely.

The archive's relative permanence, combined with the ability to search messages by author, raised concerns about privacy and confirmed often-repeated past admonishments that posters should be cautious in discussing themselves and others.

Since May 2014, European users can request to have search results for their name from Google Groups, including their Usenet archive, delinked under the right to be forgotten law.

"My Deja News" offered the ability to read Usenet in the traditional chronological, per-group manner, and to post new messages to the network.

[18] In 2008, Google broke the Groups search functionality and left it nonfunctional for about a year, until a Wired article spurred the company to fix the problems.

[19][20] On February 13, 2015, a Vice Media story reported that the ability to perform advanced searches across all groups had again become nonfunctional, and to date, Google has neither fixed nor acknowledged the problem.

Viewing and searching of historical data will still be supported as it is done today.An explanatory page adds:[22] In addition, Google's Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) server and associated peering will no longer be available, meaning Google will not support serving new Usenet content or exchanging content with other NNTP servers.

Google Groups was the first of several websites to be blocked by the Turkish government in rapid succession solely for including material that allegedly offended Islam.