Privately held Google Inc has announced its purchase of the Usenet Discussion Service from Deja.com for an undisclosed amount. The search-engine company has already taken over Usenet, which appears at http://groups.google.com/.
Google now owns the Usenet archive, dating back to 1995, its software, the domain names deja.com and dejanews.com, its trademarks and other intellectual property, Google said in a news release. Usenet is linked to the Google search engine, allowing users to access the last six months of discussion postings and message threads. The entire archive of some 500 million messages will be available in the future.
The popular Google search engine handles 70 million searches daily, with about half occurring at the company's Web site, the California-based company said.
The company's name is a play on the word "googol," coined by Milton Sirotta, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. The term refers to the number represented by one followed by 100 zeros. In the search engine's corporate culture, the word is meant to reflect its mission to "organise the immense amount of information available on the Web", according to the Google Web site.