Newzbin was one of the first – if not the first- Usenet indexing services. That was a long time ago and IIRC it was free back then but turned to a paysite eventually. The main achievement of the site operators was however the nzb format which made it a lot easier to download multiple files [...]

Categories: The Web

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.

Categories: Online Services, The Web

Newsgroup indexing sites such as binsearch.info and binaries.nl make it easier to search for files that have been posted to the Usenet by allowing searches in all groups. If you are familiar with the Usenet you might know that you can only search one group at a time which does not help much if you do not know if the file(s) that you are looking for have been posted in that group.

Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows