Google usenet archive

This may have been covered before so apologies in advance (I checked back a few pages, honest) but does anyone know if the problem with Google's usenet archive is likely to be resolved or is there a way to work around it?

Specifically I'm referring to the soc.sexuality.spanking newsgroup, the vast majority of old posts in the group have been inaccessible via Google's interface for over a year now. There were many, many great stories posted there which sadly haven't made it on to this site (or anywhere else AFAIK). It seems such a shame that they are apparently lost forever.

I have made a few posts on it but probably a while back. Basically, the search function (and browse function beyond a certain number of messages) on Google's usenet archive has been broken for probably a couple of years now. As far as I'm able to determine Google are aware of it but seem totally disinterested in fixing it. The tragedy is that since they took over the usenet archive from Deja News they are effectively the sole source of it. In addition, just to make the archive as unusable as possible, they block you if you scroll through the pages at anything other than a snail's pace, something you are often forced to do since their search function is totally screwed.

Bumping as I've been trying to use the archive again recently. One thing I have found which may help others:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.sexuality.spanking/topics?hl=en&start=30000&sa=N


The 30000 in the link above relates to which topics are displayed (there's approx 77000 archived in total). You can change this number to whatever you like. 30000 takes you back to July 2001 for example. Only really useful if you know when a story was posted but I've managed to find a couple at least.

As Februs said they do block you for an hour or so though if you scroll through too many pages. Also ominously Google are displaying a message that Groups is going to be changing shortly so they'll probably break it even further in the near future.

There's a new interface available now for google groups and it looks like they've fixed the search engine at last