Post by c***@gmail.comSorry but do not unterstand technical things!
breaking it down, rec.heraldry is actually a USENET group. USENET is actually older than the the WWW or World Wide Web. (at risk of losing you, the HTTP you see sometimes stands for hyper text protocol and it's what started the system of cutting the internet into "pages" and putting links in those pages to other pages, pictures, and etc, which was the birth of the world wide web..)
In the beginning was USENET, and REC.HERALDRY was a group hosted on USENET, and it was found to be good. ALT.TALK.ROYALTY would sometimes overlap, and by changing the address at the top, one could post to a group or many groups. More to the point, all followup posts could be set to include more groups if u wanted or you could "trim" your post to only one group if your response was no longer broad enough to concern other groups. Some nefarious persons would even answer a post broadly, then trim "followups" to only one, -and an unrelated one-, group. That way it made them look like they got the last word when all responses went elsewhere.
Now that most bulletin boards, forums, and groups are actually on websites, things are different. Google has it's own forums - but also redistributes USENET groups.
All that means that you could have been redirected without realizing it, or thought you were unsuccessful in google groups but were. But you ARE here, which is good if you are interested in the stuff we prattle on and on about...