Does anyone here use Google Groups for search?

Yeah, I've found the same. Consensus seems to be that Google has screwed the pooch wrt to its Groups search. You'll also notice that by default it searches websites, online forums and Google's own internal groups. Not good.

Mark Lipton

It's a slight pain to have to add the alt.food.wine and do full groups search, but at least the archives are still there.

On the basis of my own experience only, though, they don't seem to be close to complete in their present state. I've Googled for old posts of mine only to come up totally blank. One time, Google was unable to turn up a *single* post of mine to afw using the search feature. As I said, not good.

Mark Lipton

If I ignore group search and just search all groups but include alt.food.wine in string, I haven't found missing posts. I searched about a dozen offlines I attended (by searching restaurant name and one wine I knew there), and found them all. Searching "german tourists" found my argument with Andros, I easily found various trolls, etc. Seems pretty complete for last decade. I know there were some holes in the Dejanews archives that Google started with before that.

That's started about a year ago, and is really sad to deal with. Luckyly putting the newsgroup name does the trick, as Dave sayd. It's no more the old "googlegroups" we used to know.