Operation n

Not to be confused with ircseek.com, irseek.com, the irc search engine has been forced to temporarily shut up shop after a few compliants in that it had bots that screenscrape channels for content without any permission. There is also an element of finding user information on these sites too. So they could be storing more information than they should be. Makeyougohmm discusses this further but to summarise:

• Is irseek creating a knowledge base or are they becoming the peeping tom’s of IRC channels without the permission of the people chatting.
• How are they maintaining the privacy of the users when their entire conversations are being logged?
• Taking without permission on the web is a bad netiquette. It’s like screenscraping or hotlinking without permission. There is a lot of great information on IRC and that’s what there is to love about IRC but there are also some semi-private conversations that people in niche groups have, even out in the open “public” channels.
• A channel op and IRC server administrator wouldn’t feel comfortable logging every word in the public channels and making it searchable without notifying the people in the channels the second they joined that this was happening.