These are useful little utilities for finding usenet articles either from newsgroups your provider doesn't carry or expired articles.

The comments in bold are taken from the Netscape Net-Search page, and any comments below that are mine. Please mail me any search engines I may have left off.

Search what the company claims is the world's largest publicly searchable Usenet news archive with DejaNews. Versatile search options allow you to find articles by date, author, subject, and newsgroup. Usenet is a powerful Internet resource; DejaNews helps put it to work for you.

I like this utility. As far as I know, this is the only search engine whose sole purpose is to search usenet. Clicking on it's graphics will take you a page with incredibly detailed search options.

Offering compact or detailed searches through what the company claims is the largest Web index, Digital Equipment Corporation's Alta Vista can help you find your way through 8 billion words filling 16 million Web pages. It also provides a full-text index of more than 13,000 newsgroups.

Pretty handy for searching UseNet, which is about the only time I ever use this utility. Does have a large problem with disproportionate hit duplication. Very fast, also.

Excite tracks down information by searching for concepts, not just keywords. Updated weekly, Excite's database contains what the company claims are more than 1.5 million Web pages, 50,000-plus Web page reviews written by journalists, the latest two weeks of Usenet news, and classifieds. Excite also includes City.Net, news from Reuters, and an interactive cartoon.

Interesting utility. Options for searching for unsorted web pages, reviewed web pages, usenet, and "Classified advertisements," whatever the hell that is. Check out their homepage sometime, too. They have one of the nicest looking pages I've seen in a long time.