Google crawling Internet chat?

[punta]

A number of people on the web have reported seing a google bot of sorts on their Internet Relay Chat servers, joining and parting channels.

Is seems that google might be archiving the contents of public channels with the aim of making them searchable, in the same way that you can search newsgroup posts via Google groups.

[dcheney]

I'm a regular op on a couple of EFnet channels - haven't seen or heard of anything like that.

[punta]

It seems that they're testing things out on smaller servers before launching it on a larger scale. If they have bugs in the software, it's better to cause a nuisance on a small network than something as large as EFnet.

There's more information here:

[manero.org...]

[abates]

A chat room I hang out in had a similar problem a while back with a site which sent a bot in and was echoing everything said to a web page without telling any of us. Once it was rumbled, it started morphing nicks to evade our bans... (wasn't Googlebot, I hasten to add)

I hope Google isn't going to start archiving IRC chat sessions, personally...

[punta]

Google wouldn't try and evade any bans. It'd always stick to the same IP range. It follows robots.txt directives in web pages faithfully and also the no archive header in USENET, there's no reason to think that it wouldn't obey bans politely.

Does anyone think that IRC chat logs are useful sources of Information? I know sometimes interesting things are said, I've seen computer problems solved quite frequently in IRC chats, but a vast majority of conversations are just babble, not to mention the l33t speak!

[abates]

I've seen some interesting IRC chats with celebrities... but they've all been put on the web anyway. :)

[punta]

There's an interesting article here [dir.salon.com] about a start-up a few years ago that tried to archive chat rooms, albeit temporarily. They failed miserably, but maybe a company of Google's stature will be able to pull it off. There's certainly some interesting ideas in that article.

[abates]

Punta: that was the site we had trouble with. We weren't well pleased.

[pleeker]

Does anyone think that IRC chat logs are useful sources of Information? I know sometimes interesting things are said, I've seen computer problems solved quite frequently in IRC chats, but a vast majority of conversations are just babble, not to mention the l33t speak!

I'd think IRC chats are at about the same level as guestbooks in terms of sources of valuable information. Maybe that's just me....

[punta]

Maybe they won't be logging chats. Maybe they're doing something else. Has anyone got any ideas of what might be up google's sleeve?

Perhaps they're looking for links mentioned in IRC?

[BlueSky]

I think it depends on the topic. Many IRC channels/chats in certain areas (tech oriented, celeb interviews, etc) have very low noise to signal ratio. They are far more info rich than quite a number of websites out there. However, I think people would get very mad if their conversations are indexed and placed in a public SE without their knowledge. This would lead to many requesting such pages be removed.

Perhaps this is something they may be considering to offer as a commercial service? I could see a large company wanting this type of info captured and indexed say for their tech support, exec chats, etc.

[BlueSky]

Coincidence or do these guys hang around here?
[theregister.co.uk...]

Maybe Google is doing this as a project for the US government. I wouldn't put anything past Bush and Ashcroft.