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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?"
Well, yes and no. xGoogle is designed largely around finding shared files on IRC IIRC (always wanted to do that). As far as I know, it depends not upon channel content, but on server/channel names and perhaps M'sOTD.
-theGreater Pedant.
that spam will extend itself to irc?
Thousands if not millions of bogus irc channels with specific keywords inserted in the topic only to attract hits on the main google search page?
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Well, how do you build up a reliable irc database.
Have your bots sit in channels worth archiving. Break logs down into manageable chunks (hourly, by size, etc), and index them. Searches pull up these chunks of log with your search terms highlighted.
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
Ever try searching for warez on Google Groups? Good luck. They don't archive the binary newsgroups, and it is simple to weed out the posts that contain binaries in regular newsgroups.
Google is pretty smart, let's wait and see what they come up with.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.