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Google Expanding To IRC?
AnimeFreak writes "In this The Register article, Google apparently has been involved in a little bit of activity in various IRC channels. According to Google, as asked by IRC Junkie: they're researching ways to improve their service and the activity is only temporary. Could this mean an ability to search for information that is contained on IRC? Services, such as Netsplit.de and Search IRC exist, and both allow the ability to get information from various IRC networks. Is Google trying to replicate what both these sites have done?"
The "information" on IRC is 99% crap. I'm concerned that, by integrating IRC searching in Google, the signal to noise ratio of Google will go way down. If however, Google keeps it as a separate service like Usenet I suspect that it will go away due to lack of interest.
Who really wants to search IRC, except the Justice Department?
Well, how do you build up a reliable irc database. I mean there are many servers and bots and so on in the irc, and most of them deal with warez and therefore are only up temporary. So if google really wants to build a irc search engine they have to find a way to get rid of the dead links, and also from links that point to illegal copy's (you can be sued for pointing to warez, can't you (see the deCss case)).
I personally would be glad, for the irc is a little bit, well, unstructured, and a search engine would definitely do good, but the problems building a database and interface based thereon seem enomous to me.
".Sig Stealer" was here
Well, recalling from where I get "news" (read: 90% useless but funny content via links), the IRC (IRCnet, which is popular in Germany) is a incredible fast distribution way for links.
Assuming that google is interested in finding new sites as soon as possible, they should crawl the irc channels.
This does not mean that they are going to index it.
We're one step closer to having Google as the Ultimate Guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything!
The IRC admins, at least for most of the better channels, will simply set up a config to kick/ban the google bot. Many channels don't allow non-human connections unless set up by the channel admins. Unlike the annoying spammers who uses legit and stolen access points, google will likely come from a single legit source making the process of denying access easier.
Google shouldn't be trying to find more content, they should be working on filtering out the mass of garbage sites that already exist.
like archiving email, usenet, and web traffic before it - this is simply a reminder that nothing you type through an open network is -private-. this is a lesson most of us should have learned a long time ago.
but this isn't an invasion of privacy. there's no expectation of privacy when you log onto a public chat board. just as there's no expectation of privacy should you decide to walk naked through a park.
the best you can hope for online is pseudonymity.
but that's out the window with the combined power of google. which is quickly becoming the internet's inadvertant Big Brother.
the primary difference being, google works -for- the people just as much as it works -against- the people.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
The idea of searchable IRC logs kindof scares me. An investigative team need only go to Google to search for discussions by someone with the nickname "l33t".
Of course, IRC logs are already out there, often made available by the denizens in charge of the channel in question. But they're not hooked up to a common database.
The speed of information dissemination is great for research and development, but that applies to both you, and people who want to learn about you.
I've mentioned several times on IRC that I have a brain disorder (Asperger's syndrome, specifically), but I may have been operating under the assumption that the information wasn't important enough to be spread around to twenty or thirty Googleable sites. To be honest, I don't care who knows, which is why I'm saying it here.
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The odd thing is that people are reporting the robot joining channels, doing /whois on users and more.
What value could the /whois info from random users have?
The only thing one can safely say about this whole situation is: Google is doing some testing on IRC.
Personally, this is how I look at it:
Google ranks websites according to many criteria. Ranging from keyword density, keywords, text placement on the page, to incoming links and what the text within the links say. What use could IRC have? It is possible that active topics that are being discussed in real time could be used to help boost rankings towards subjects that are currently hot topics, similar to how google currently temporarily boosts the scoring of newly indexed pages to the google index. This is of course, pure speculation.
As others no doubt have already thought -- actual postings of private user information would be useless, as ChatScan had several million in funding couldn't pull it off with the IRC community two years ago. However, using that information to derive popular subjects might.
OTOH, google can likely gleam similar information from the millions of searches users enter into their search engine each day.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!