Google groups usenet search broken

Google groups usenet search is missing lots of posts: doesn't seem to be noted in many places, but here is an example.

quoted here:

From: Tim Smith
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: [OT] Someone broke Google Groups search
User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.3b2 (Intel Mac OS X)
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:37:13 -0700
Message-ID:
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Google groups search for "Tim Smith". 9 hits. Click "sort by date" and
then there are 161000 hits.

Google groups search for "Roy Schestowitz". 4 hits. Click "sort by
date" and then there are 104000 hits.

Google groups search for "Mark Kent". 46200 hits. Click "sort by date"
and it stays 46200 hits.

It used to be that you'd get about the same number of hits regardless of
whether you sorted by date or relevance. It's still doing that with
Mark, but for Roy and me, it gives far fewer hits when sorted by
relevance.

Anyone else seeing this? Or am I just hitting a bad server? (It's been
like this for a few days for me, but they seem to use some kind of
scheme to try to send you to the same server when you come back, so if
there is a broken server in their pool, I could be stuck on it).


--
--Tim Smith