I'm one of the Aminet admins. I did not discusss this with the rest of the team yet, but personally I like the idea of making a 'safe' backup of the Amiga related Usenet groups.
It should be noted though that if Aminet is going to carry these backups, it will be most likely in the form of ZIP archives (like one ZIP per year and group for example) or something like that. We certainly lack the manpower to implement anything resembling dejanews'/google's comfortable web interface - not to mention the fact that such a web interface would require hosting half a million postings as individual text files.
Of course, once the postings are available from Aminet, a third party could use the data to implement a web interface or similar things.
I agree that the best approach would be to approach google stressing the 'non-profit organisation' concept of Aminet. Any further suggestions?
Oh, and could somebody supply me with a contact adress for google? Somehow neither IB nor AWeb will let me visit the original google.com site, I always end up on the German version (despite following the link "google.com in English").
