Direct Read News - Searching for Newsgroups

Searching for Newsgroups: The Direct Read News newsgroup search enables you to quickly locate a specific newsgroup on the news server, or a list of newsgroups based on your search phrase. Once you've found a newsgroup or a list of groups, you can use your web browser's "bookmark" feature to tag your favorite discussion forums for quick access in the future.

A search may be as simple as inputting a single newsgroup name like "news.announce.newusers", which would take you directly to the "news.announce.newusers" newsgroup through the Direct Read News web interface, or it could be a compound search that would locate a collection of groups based on a string of keywords and special characters that you might put together...

Search Characters: The Newsgroup Search engine will accept a variety of special characters, which will aid you in finding a broad or specific collection of newsgroups, based on the way you couple the these characters with keywords in the search field. These characters are described in further detail below:

"*" - The asterisk symbol is a wild card search character. As an example, *.sports.* would find newsgroups that have the word sports in their newsgroup title, sports.* would find all groups that start with the word sports, and *.sports would find all groups that end with the word sports.
"|" - The pipe symbol is used to join multiple searches. As an example sports.*|*.sports would list all groups that started with the word sports or ended with the word sports. It could also be used to search related newsgroups that might appear in different Usenet hierarchies, such as alt.sports.*|rec.sports.* which would find all newsgroups in the "alt" (Alternative) or "rec" (Recreation) hierarchies that utilized the word sports in their group titles.
"&" - The ampersand symbol is a limiting character, meaning a search will only yield groups with one word beyond the "&" symbol. As an example, comp.& would retrieve a newsgroup title like "comp.ai" which only had two words in its title, while a group like "comp.ai.alife" would not be retrieved in this example because the title contains more than two total words.
"^" - This symbol is another limiting character, meaning the search will only detect newsgroup titles with no other characters to the left of the "^" symbol. As an example ^rec would pick up all newsgroups starting with the word "rec", but would ignore a newsgroup like "alt.recreation" because it does not begin with the word "rec" in this example.