In Search Of
Everything the recovery effort has gone looking for and not yet brought home, grouped by hunt status - confirmed dead ends first, then gated and candidate leads, then the open frontier. The honest inverse of Holdings.
Probed and confirmed absent
- rec.music.jerry-garcia Probed and confirmed absent
- Why wanted
- A whole dedicated group for Jerry Garcia's solo work - the sister scene to the main lineage. Never harvested, so every message would be net-new.
- Where we looked
- Internet Archive: a clean triple-query negative (no usenet mbox spool exists). UsenetArchives: a true negative (the age-gate was solved via cookie replay; the group returns empty from both APIs). Authenticated eternal-september NNTP: GROUP rec.music.jerry-garcia returns 411 No such group. All three public, free native avenues are now confirmed-absent; only a paid deep-retention NNTP provider or a private archive dump remains.
- Work-area path
- _source-probes/eternal-september-probe-report.json
- alt.music.jerry-garcia Probed and confirmed absent
- Why wanted
- The alt-hierarchy sibling to rec.music.jerry-garcia - the same Jerry-solo sister scene under a different top-level hierarchy.
- Where we looked
- Internet Archive and UsenetArchives: the same true-negative results as rec.music.jerry-garcia. Authenticated eternal-september NNTP: GROUP alt.music.jerry-garcia also returns 411 No such group. All three public, free native avenues are confirmed-absent.
- Work-area path
- _source-probes/probe-eternal-september.mjs
Gated leads
Nothing is currently in this status.
Candidates, not yet pulled
Nothing is currently in this status.
Open leads
- alt.binaries.gdead Open lead, unprobed
- Why wanted
- The binary/attachment Grateful Dead group - encoded audio and art. Genuine net-new territory; expect a low text yield but real artifact content.
- Where we looked
- Not yet harvested. Queued behind rec.music.jerry-garcia for a native-first NNTP/Internet-Archive probe of its own lane.
- rec.music.artists.bruce-hornsby Open lead, unprobed
- Why wanted
- Bruce Hornsby played with the Grateful Dead from 1990 to 1992 - Grateful-Dead-adjacent, not a sister scene. Wanted as a GD-topical slice only: crossposts and mentions, not a full-group harvest.
- Where we looked
- No location probe has run yet. The planned pass is a GD-scoped bare-hit candidate query against UsenetArchives, not a full index.
- ba.* (Bay Area regional) Open lead, unprobed
- Why wanted
- The Bay Area regional Usenet hierarchy carried heavy Grateful Dead traffic in the early-to-mid 1980s. A GD-scoped bare-hit candidate pass, not a full-index lane.
- Where we looked
- No location probe has run yet; UTZOO tapes are the intended native source. Note: the Internet Archive usenethistorical ba.* spool holds only local Bay Area groups, never the rec.* hierarchy, so that lane alone will not resolve this one.
- Gopher frontier re-chase (open recovery leads) Open lead, unprobed
- Why wanted
- Three results from the gopher passes were premature-closed, not true negatives, and each targets exhibit-grade content the project explicitly values: named Deadhead essays missing from the mirrored text tree, the login-gated WELL DEADLIT conference posts, and an unqueried Gopherbot spider SQL index.
- Where we looked
- Logged 2026-07-06 from the full 2007 gopher-mirror scan. None of the three leads is a true negative - each has a known, unexecuted recovery path: a Wayback HTTP mirror or an alternate Gopherbot crawl year for the missing essays, a WELL member export for the gated DEADLIT posts, and a direct query of the gopher-arch-sqldump.bz2 spider table.
- Work-area path
- _source-probes/gopher-mirror-full-scan.md