I’m very fond of the Usenet client Newsbin which I have been using for many years. It’s not a free software and I made the purchase because at that time it was definitely the best client available. I’m sometimes getting asked if there are free alternatives to Newsbin and I always have to say that [...]
The best Usenet Search Engines
This article is going to list some of the best Usenet search engines that are freely available. The Usenet is considered by many a dark side of the Internet, something that those who know do not talk about and those who do not know don’t want to know about because it seems utterly complicated to begin with.
Giganews University
I’m using the Usenet (Newsgroups) provider Giganews for several years already and recommend the service to anyone who wants to sneak peak or go knee deep into Usenet. I don’t want to talk about the performance of their servers, the reliability and file retention which sets a very high Industry standard that all the other Usenet Providers have a hard time keeping pace with.
Giganews Accelerator Updates
I wrote about the Giganews Accelerator when it first came out which was just a bit more than two months ago and have been using it since then to speed up header downloads with my own Giganews account. The Giganews accelerator speeds up header downloads by the factor eight on my connection which is really great.
I always had to wait the longest time to wait until the headers of popular groups were downloaded which took an awfully long time. A great thing is that the Giganews Accelerator is also supporting SSL connections. Giganews released a total of eight new versions of the program since the initial release which is an astounding number if you ask me.
List of Usenet Indexing Websites
There are two possibilities to download binaries from the Usenet. The first one is the most common one. You download the headers of a newsgroup that you are interested in and select the files that you want to download. All of this is done in your newsclient. This method has some serious disadvantages.
You may not search through many newsgroups at once for instance or search for files in a large list of groups. Usenet indexing sites try to aid users by offering a way to search the contents of many newsgroups at once. They index new posts that appear in the observed groups and offer web interfaces that users can use to search for files.
Pan Newsreader
I have been trying several newsreaders for the Usenet until I finally found the one and only newsreader Newsbin. I purchased it years ago and can only recommend it to everyone else who is serious about the Usenet. I do know however that some users prefer free software and that is why I took a look at the Pan newsreader which is available for Windows, Mac and Unix.
Pan Newsreader is offering a lot of features that commercial Usenet readers such as Newsbin are offering as well. It does support download binaries of course offering single-click encoding, multiple connections and simultaneous downloads and image previews of downloaded images.
Giganews Accelerator Beta
The world’s best Usenet provider Giganews has managed it once again to set another milestone by creating a software called Giganews Accelerator which uses header download compression to download the headers of the newsgroup up to 10 times faster. Header downloads are the most annoying part when it comes to using the Usenet. It sometimes takes longer to download the headers of a popular newsgroup than to download a 700 Megabytes file with my 16 Mbit connection.
