Advanced Groups Search Broken

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It appears that Google Groups Advanced Search has been broken with regards to filtering by-groupname since at least July 10, 2007. I had been noticing some apparently anomalous searches recently. My latest example was when I was trying to search for the word "publish" and the phrase "on server" connected with the Progress database. The search entry as reformulated by Google came up as looking like this:

publish "on server" group:*.progress


Few if any of the hits returned were actually from a group name ending in .progress. Upon closer inspection, all of the messages I checked *did* have the word "progress" in the text however, so it was looking like the "group:" qualifier is being ignored and the word "progress" is treated just like another search word. So, I tried another search:

publish "on server" progress


but did find a different number of hits-- the original returned 232, and this one returned 245-- so my guess about how it's mistreating the string is apparently not completely accurate but there seems little doubt that Advanced Search in Groups is no longer correctly handling group filtering.

A few weeks ago I had some similar issues when searching with a *.delphi.* qualifier. However, I did just try a search for "scsi" with a group qualifier of *.linux.* and *that* seems to return primarily linux groups.

Also, additional testing with my "progress" search, I find that if I specify the complete "comp.databases.progress" as the group filter, I get just one hit and from the right group-- also if I enter *.databases.progress I seem to get that same single hit-- but on the other hand, if I include "databases.progress" or "comp.databases.progress" as a simple search term and *don't use* a group filter at all, I also get that same single hit-- so that test doesn't properly differentiate from the use of the term as a group filter vs just another search word. There are probably better tests that could be formulated given some thought...

I also found another complaint regarding bogus behaviour of Advanced Search in Groups (in google.groups.guide) -- from July 10 which seems to describe the same problem, and I have been noticing some oddness in the ability to restrict based on a group filter parameter for weeks so I presume this bug crept in with the recent facelift of the Groups code where the article counts and a few other things changed (mostly for the worse). Article counts USED to appear whenever there were more than one article in a thread, now often article counts do not show up even when there are multiple articles in the thread (verified when you actually click on a thread with no article count and see that there are multiple articles). In fact, few messages show article counts anymore, which is a pain when you're looking for an answer to a question and would just as soon weed-out no-response threads-- I really wish you could search with a minimum-article-count qualifier, as *that* would be a useful enhancement, instead of the cosmetic crap they've been working on.

I'm not sure if there's any other forum where Google bugs are discussed, but I found the group filtering one to be particularly annoying as I've been using Groups on a near-daily basis for years-- since the early days when it was DejaNews. With the exception of a just few minor things, Google's "enhancements" have not been improvements since that time.

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