Can I use the File Locator searches to search my Usenet news server?

You can only use File Attachment Locator to search the set of news servers that we index. News servers do not maintain an index of the files available on them. So we have a set of indexing computers here to index serveral servers. Our indexing servers check what messages are available on the servers and build a database that News Rover uses when you perform a search.

Every hour, our search server connects to a few major news servers and downloads information about all available messages for more than 5,200 binary newsgroups. It then sorts and indexes this information in a database that is used for the searches. On a typical day there are over 70 million complete files available in the index. Because of the computing involved in making this index, it is not practical for us to index many news servers. We chose several that are fast, have a large number of newsgroups, have a good message retention period, and can be subscribed to by anyone and accessed through the Internet. We may consider indexing other major news server at a future date.

Note that even though we only index only a few servers, the same messages should be available on most news servers. When you double-click a message to start downloading it, the actual download is directed to your local news server. The only reason they would not be available would be if the server you are downloading from does not support all of the binary newsgroups or if it expires messages sooner than the servers that we index.

When you do a search, the newest matching messages are listed first, making them the most likely to be available.

If you have access to multiple news servers, you can direct News Rover to try to find the messages on all of them. To do this, get into the search screen and click the Search Properties button. Then go to the Download Servers property page and assign non-zero priorities to the servers you want News Rover to look on when attempting to do the download.

If you find that your local news server frequently does not have messages found by News Rover's search, you may want to consider subscribing to a better news server (you can still use the same ISP to connect to the Internet). For a list of recommended news servers, please click here.

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