The Labour government’s dithering has opened up a five year hole in the UK’s digital archives…

“Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament […] ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites.”

Further evidence that even writers for Wired.com don’t know how to really search the web. Kevin Poulsen whines today that Google’s Usenet archive has become very awkward to search…

“Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive. Want to find Marc Andreessen’s historic March 14, 1993 announcement in alt.hypertext of the Mosaic web browser? “Your search – mosaic – did not match any documents.” Flat searches of the entire archive still work, but they aren’t very useful: there are 1.42 million hits on “mosaic.” The rise of Microsoft, the first Usenet review of the IBM PC in 1981, early rumblings of a Y2K problem in 1985 — it’s all locked in Google Groups, virtually irretrievable if you don’t already have a direct link. “The search results are extremely poor,” says network pioneer Brad Templeton. “Like nobody cares.”

Cough. http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/topics. See that page’s little search box labelled “Search this group”, Kevin? I typed in Mosaic + Marc, and was returned just 74 results.