punta - 4:39 pm on Nov 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

Why the hell would you want to search IRC? G need to concentrate on getting spam out of their index before they bugger around with something that could be abused easily.

Maybe that's exactly what they are doing. Spammers often run bots that sit on IRC channels spamming people with website URLs whenever they join the channel.

Perhaps googlebotIRC is collecting these spam URLs with the intent of removing them from the google index.