That's just silly. If it's on Usenet, search engines will have it. :mellow:
Searching for... what? By filename? Certainly, if you already know the filename, then any search engine will retrieve it for you.
But what if the filename doesn't match what you think? Say, looking for Season 1 Disc 5 of some tv program dvd. Now, if the thing was posted as 'xxxxS1D5' or something like that, pretty darn simple. But what if the poster called it 'yyyyydiscxseasonk' then you're pretty much hosed. The Newzbin editor *hopefully* will have sucked it down, figured out what it was, and indexed it properly as 'Silly TV program, season 1, disc 5'.
That's what makes all the difference. Not every poster posts the 'proper' (whatever that is) title, in fact, a great number of them are pretty darned obtuse.
So, unless one wants to spend the time d/l'ing tons of junk trying to find out what the *heck* it is (I sure used to), it's a good resource. In fact, since they tightend up things with v3 and started requiring the editors to identify the video format of the listed files, one can really do some excellent searches slicing and dicing the listings.
I note a couple others echoed what I just said, and others kinda blew it off. But there is no 'standard' naming convention, far from it. And folks don't post in the most obvious of newsgroups for the material they are uploading.
It's a crapshoot. Newsbin narrows the odds down, sometimes a bit, sometimes a lot. They do miss a lot, and the other indexing sites miss the same (if not more) amount. That's why I d/l headers on a few 'select' newsgroups I've found to have a high incidence of (unindexed)'good stuff' to make it worthwhile.