In the old interface version of Google Groups there seems to be no way to browse groups by category. It is only possible to browse all groups at once. And they call that browsing… I call it showing all groups at once, nothing else. So you have to either "browse" all groups, or you don't browse at all.
While viewing the Home page, if I click on the Browse all link it brings me to the "group search results for all groups" page and it lists the first 15 or 16 groups and as I scroll down it loads more and more groups to the list. It simply lists all groups there are.
The second option you have if you want to find a group is to use the search field and type in its' name. But these are two different concepts. If I knew the name of the group, I wouldn't be browsing for it, would I? So I mean browsing groups by category is a way to discover new groups, groups whose names you don't know yet.
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Is this possible to do in the new Google Groups interface?
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If not, is there a known workaround for this?
Update: From here, I tried switching back to the old version of the interface and this is where it brought me. This is supposed to be the old classic Google Groups home page with group categories. But instead it only shows the "Browse all groups" link and a search field for typing in the name of the group.
What happened to all the categories?
If I click the "browse all groups" link it brings up the list of all groups, just as I would use the new interface. So right now the old version of the interface is kind of behaving the same way as the new one. So now I can't even use the old one.
What is this?…
This is what it is supposed to look like:
Best Answer
I figured it out.
Go to https://groups.google.com/ If you use the old interface for Google Groups click the button "Switch to the new groups".
It should sit in the lower right corner of the browser window. If you cannot find it, visit https://groups.google.com/d/?fromgroups Now set the new interface as default.
Try going to https://groups.google.com/ You should now see only the new interface. It will redirect you to https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!overview
From here, click on the "Browse all" link. It will take you to https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!browse Here you should see the group categories as you're used to with the classic Google Groups interface. Only here you will not see any icons for the categories, just simple blue links. I guess it fits better with the new interface design.
Now here's what happens if I click on the "My groups" link from here.
Click on "My groups" link on the left. It will take me to https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!myforums It says "You also belong to groups in 1 other organization. show; View 1 group at googleproductforums.com"
Click on the link. It takes me to https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!myforums "Google Product Forums (59 subgroups)"
Click on the "Home" link on the left. It takes me to https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!overview
Click on "Browse all" button. It takes me to https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forumsearch/ and it shows all the subgroups... I think.
So my conclusion is that https://productforums.google.com and https://groups.google.com/ are not the same thing. Go figure! The former uses Google Groups service, but it is a separate Google website. It has no browsing of groups (subgroups actually) by category, since there are no more than 59 subgroups to Google Product Forums or 277 subgroups in total.
The same is true even if you use the classic Google Groups interface. So just make sure you are actually at https://groups.google.com/ and not some random website URL that only uses the Google Groups service and is not actually "the" Google Groups [website].