It would be short-sighted to take us on. Then, we can test the responses of those people in the specific demographic groups to specific messages and report back to the companies what we've found and how we can help them better achieve their goals. And yet, Deja News' marketing studies would be nothing without its base of users, who come to the site not to be tested, but to instead test the database for information they seek. Deja News' critics contend that increasingly, posts to several of the more controversial newsgroups are being dragged out of Deja News' search engine and reposted to either make a point or discredit someone else's opinion with what they'd perhaps said before on the topic. Even so, there is nothing that Deja News can do about people cutting and pasting old posts into new ones, and it's Madere's contention that the search engine itself actually reduces the number of repetitive posts by cutting down on the number of questions already asked and answered.
Discussion groups have a lot more in common with traditional communities.
When you meet somebody in the real world and they say something interesting and you want to get to know them better, typically you'll go to other people who've talked with them in the past and find out about the person. And this, by looking at what and where they've posted, can help you determine whether somebody's a gadfly or significant contributor. In theory, offering full access to a user's online history might appear to raise a new set of Internet privacy concerns. The only things that are available on Deja News are things that have been posted to Usenet and have been already visible to 24 million people daily. There can be no privacy concerns to making something that has been posted to Internet discussion groups searchable.