My current boss was a news admin at Dejanews and was there during
their end days. I was the sysadmin for the datacenter (SMARTNAP) that
DejaNews was co-lo'd in. Everyone wanted to peer with my news server
since it fed directly into Dejanews' stuff which was a couple of racks
down from my stuff.
Google bought Deja and ruined it.
I knew the head sysadmin from Dejanews very well and I remember his story about them being bought out by Google. Google flew in a bunch of engineers with a bunch of disks, imaged the whole database over a weekend, and then fired everyone. Good times.
-Henry