Google Group search was horribly broken for months, across many or all Google-hosted groups too, not just Usenet. It would only return results from the previous few weeks.
It seems to have been fixed sometime in the last couple weeks.
And the spam filter is broken. Lots of user created group are marked as spam and can not start or reply any topic. One of my group were marked as spam and locked up seconds after I just created it.
“It turns out there was a bug, a specific bug, that affected search within a specific group,” Google spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou told wired.com late Wednesday.
Based on my own Google Usenet searches this past year, this is total nonsense. How are we ever supposed to trust them to have a monopoly on indexing the world's out-of-print books (you have read the settlement terms, haven't you?) when they can't even be honest about their mistakes?
How is the statement is dishonest? My guess is that she meant "affected searches that were limited by group" while you heard "affected searches within this one particular group".
The quotation is simply a gigantic understatement. Usenet search is broken in almost every possible way and she should have said so. First and foremost, I rarely get results that are actually in the archive, but pages from the main web search. Phrases from known existing posts do not return results any longer. Several Usenet providers have acceptable Spam filters, but Google apparently has none.
Google as the buyer of the Deja archive has a responsibility here and they should live up to it (as they did up to around 2004).
It seems to have been fixed sometime in the last couple weeks.