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1. Why provide an IRC search engine ?
We believe that a lot of interesting/useful information is flowing in IRC. For example, technical public-channels (e.g. #ubuntu, #iphone) produce a lot of quality content that can be helpful to many others that are not currently on those chat-room. We believe that the knowledge-base that we are creating this way is complementary to other existing KB's.
2. How does IRSeeK compare to other IRC search engines ?
Existing IRC search-engines mostly focus on very specific niches. For example, isohunt or packetnews (file sharing mostly), and other sites that have a very small subset of channels usually in very specific topics. IRSeek aims to create a one-stop-shop for all human-generated, public-channels searches.
3. What is the overall goal for IRSeeK?
To expose the wonderful content from public-channels on IRC to the entire Web community.
4. Can you explain or give us some history into where the name comes from ?
Simple :) IRC (pronounced like "eye are see") and Seek.
5. Can you provide some insight into how the indexing is all done ?
We are using multiple IRC clients to archive the messages posted on public channels, and then use various open-source tools to process, index, and make the content available on the web.
6. Can you reveal or hint on any future plans ?
Our plans are to grow our database and improve the user experience.
7. How many networks/channels will IRSeek attempt to watch?
It's hard to say at this point. We believe that there are a lot of "interesting" public channels that the community can enjoy. (by interesting we mean public, large, highly-topic-focused, human-generated-content channels).
As you might have seen on the TechCrunch comment's page, we've received a lot of supportive and concerned emails and have decided to suspend our search pages until we mitigate all concerns from our users.
Stay tuned:)
I would like to thank Ariel and Eran for taking the time to answer our questions, the other interesting thing about all this would be another Israel based company that started from next to nothing also used word play and is now one of the biggest IM's out there as well as a top 25 IRC Network ICQ.
Personally ive had a lot of fun using IRSeek reading back some of the channels and pointing out errors made by some i know its weird saying "you know back in march 2006.. you got that question so wrong..."
Everyone will have there opinion on how useful IRSeek is or isnt my personal opinion being if its kept to the good help channels, which are providing useful information then IRSeek will be a hit.