Easynews Search

Oh no, Easynews got a fancy new home page! Well, it is nowhere near as garish as some of their competition's. Hopefully they won't ever go that far. Easynews is the epitome of minimalist and I hope that never changes.

When my friend Paul recommended them in 2007, he had already been using them since around 1998 which is pretty strong endorsement. When I found that I wasn't using the service that much, I cancelled it in May 2008. At the time I was informed that if I re-activated the account within a year, I could get my username and unused Gigabytes back. I sign up again 15 months later and still got my username and unused Gigabytes back! I guess they forgot to delete me. I had accumulated ~240GB, so this was a really nice surprise.

It took a while to get used the search engine, which actually takes regular expressions in the search terms. How geeky! I know my regex-fu isn't that strong, but I was getting some odd results. I re-read the very terse help page and realized the search terms could also be key words, which were of course separated by spaces. So if you want to match a space in the regex, you have to enclose the entire expression in quotes. Intuitive, yes?

The search results have a lot of links to tools with no explanation of what they do. Today I found out the "parViewer" link is actually very useful. It shows a page which indicates if you need the parity files to reconstruct the file. On a big file this can save a lot unnecessary downloading. This doesn't work for .nzb files, though, but that makes sense as they are less reliable.

Yes, Easynews is the epitome of minimalist but is a useful minimalist. ^_^