Apparently IRC participants don’t really like the idea of their conversations being indexed and searchable. Which is exactly what we said when we first wrote about IRSeek four days ago.The site has now shut down. A blog post explains why:

we have disabled the site…we were under the impression that users in public chat-rooms are aware that their conversations are, by definition, public. Since people are allowed to go in and out of such channels, and anyone could be logging (and most likely automatically logging the conversations in their own IRC client) the channels, it will come as no surprise to users that their chats are available on the web. Also, we assume you are aware of the fact that IRSeek is not the first entity to place IRC logs on the web, and most likely not the last one to do it (ignoring the possibility that chat logs may be stored by others, and not made available to the entire community). We think that users/operators who believe that their discussions on public channels on IRC are private (except their IP, realname, fullname, nickname) are under a serious misconception, with-or-without IRSeek. With that, we read the responses of our users and realize that some are definitely concerned.

Great idea, but people are freaked out about having their IRC chats be public (even though they already are). IRSeek is deadpooled for now.

Update (1/4/08): IRSeek is back up in a limited form. From the IRSeek blog:

Please note that following the concerns voiced by many IRC users we have removed the majority of our content. We are hoping to bring a lot of content back as soon as we get an approval for it, together with a lot of new content.

The service now has both opt-in and opt-out features, and has scaled back its archived conversations from 300 million to 15 million. We’ll see if these moves are enough to pull it out of the deadpool.

New Israeli startup IRSeek is indexing public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels at the rate of 6 million conversations a day. 300 million conversations have now been indexed by the company. The most popular networks, including EFnet, DALnet, Freenode and QuakeNetUndernet, are all being monitored – IRSeeK is now “listening” to 2000+ channels across 10 networks.

There are few IRC search engines today, and most focus on specific niches or single networks, the Company says. Nearly two decades worth of data contained on IRC servers has effectively been lost. IRSeek wants to make sure that future conversations are properly indexed and and searchable. It’s a huge untapped knowledge-base.

So if you want to see what people are saying on IRC about, say, iPhone unlocks, now you can. The most popular search terms populate a query could on the front page of the site.

The company was founded by Eran Cohen (CEO), and Ariel Berkman (CTO). Development began in mid-2006.

The company says a channel is dropped when file sharing activity is detected and private conversations are not eavesdropped in anyway. Still, some IRC users, who have a possibly unreasonable expectation of privacy, may be troubled by IRSeeK. Personal information is often revealed in IRC chats. That information is now indexed and searchable. Searches can also be conducted by IRC nicknames, and all conversations involving that nickname (or even if they were just in the room) are linked. Of course, nicknames aren’t unique and many users may choose the same nickname over time. But even so, the knowledge that everything being typed can be later found by others may have a chilling effect on users.