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Deja Vu All Over Again
Kirby's Korner · August 27, 1999

Deja News -- now known as Deja.com -- used to have a clever name and did one thing well. Visitors could go to the Web site and look for messages from Usenet newsgroups using a keyword search.

It was a great tool for doing research or for tracking down information you knew you had seen somewhere in the newsgroups. And, despite being a Web-based product, it was fairly quick.

Now, however, the folks behind the company have decided they want to be all things to all people. Deja.com added a ratings feature that lets visitors grade 9,000 products in 400 categories on five or so attributes, on a scale of 1 to 5. Visitors can learn what others think of everything from individual films to online booking services.

At one point when I checked in, Southwest Airlines was the top-rated booking Web site, followed by the now-defunct Preview Travel.

All of which shows the foolishness of this type of instant rating, driven by a mass of individuals that, for all we know, never use any of the products they are reviewing. I like the Southwest Web site. It carries through well on the type of fun image the airline tries to project. But how anyone who flies any carrier except Southwest -- or who stays in hotels, rents cars, or wants to go to any location not served by Southwest -- can rank the site above the many others on the Web is beyond me.

This is part of a move on behalf of Deja.com to expand. You can still search some 45,000 newsgroups there, and you can visit "communities," which are essentially newsgroup-type discussion areas that Deja.com has created for its own site. You can also join chat sessions and link out to "partner" Web sites to buy books and otherwise engage in e-commerce.

The effect is that the site is no longer as focused as it once was, to its detriment.

If anything, a leading Deja.com competitor, RemarQ, is worse. As you pull up the home page, it looks like nearly every other search engine page you've ever seen, with major categories and sub-categories.

RemarQ covers some 34,000 newsgroups, including 25 in travel. (I was not able to figure out how many travel newsgroups Deja.com has, but it lists more than 140 travel categories, each containing one or more newsgroups. Obviously, most of the newsgroups are listed under more than one category.)

During my visit, RemarQ was exceedingly slow in returning search requests and loading pages. I've met some folks who swear by it, however.

Both sites are advertiser-driven. In addition, RemarQ makes money by handling newsgroup activities for more than 1,000 other Web sites. It also sells individuals newsgroup access.

Both companies -- formed within months of each other in 1995 and 1996 -- want to be the next Yahoo!, one of the few Internet companies actually turning a profit. Both are trying to do this by playing on a sense of community. But building an infrastructure does not a community make.

Deja.com, in particular, might find a clue in Yahoo!'s use of real people to categorize Web sites. In one Deja-operated "community" I examined, half the messages were spam, most with titles such as "Meet more chicks." And this is part of its site over which Deja.com has complete control.

My advice: find a good newsreader and a good Usenet feed. Use these overgrown "communities" only when you have to do research.

David Kirby is the editor of the Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at david@ticked.com.