punta - 3:32 pm on Nov 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

Google gets a listing of all channels and topics on an IRC network. When it sees a URL in the topic of a channel, it enters the channel. Once it's in, it gets a list of all users. It then performs analysis on this information to determine the importance of the link. If a channel has just one person in it, then it could easily be spam so it won't have much importance assigned to it. The channel list will show the number of users within the channel, so joining the channel will not provide any additional information. Add to it that large channels already suffer from being larger than what IRC was originally designed for, a robot that joins every time it looks at the list will not likely be welcome unless it also promotes that channel in some way (and even then, some channels don't want any promotion). Also I think that assuming a larger channel equates to having more important topics is a false assumption. Only the channel operators get to change the topics, so that limits the field of who gets access to topic changing, and that there are many mismanaged channels that have large numbers of users.

Interesting points. Let's say that Google takes more in to account than just users. After all they take lots of factors in to account when determining the importance of a web document.

How about they're looking at the ops/users ratio, amount of conversation going on in channel, number of spammers, the language being used in the channel.

The thing is that Google seems to be joining channels very briefly. What information can google get from breif visits? What can google do with this information.