The paid search function in newsbin is similar to supersearch in newsleecher. It searches an index stored on DJIs servers (they make newsbin) rather than the headers on giganews directly. To search giganews files, you need to download the headers for the groups you're interested in and search them locally, but frankly that is prohibitively time consuming and uses quite a bit of hard-disk space.
Just to add though, Giganews is considered extremely over priced nowadays. Especially since you'd probably need SSL to hide your traffic from your school.
Astraweb is a far cheaper (and better) service.
There are also smaller (and free) clients that no longer have the built in header storage features that newsbin and newsleecher have.
Sabnzbd and
alt.binz for instance. These rely on external nzb indexing sites (also free) like
Nzbindex and
binsearch (and for a small fee
Newzbin, who invented the whole nzb thing). This method, especially when combined with rss, is a lot faster than header downloading and cheaper than the built-in 'paid' search engines.
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