After a bot belonging to a Google IP address kept appearing in various IRC channels, folks started blogging about it.

No one knows for certain if Google is archiving IRC interactions or otherwise tracking behavior, but it does continue to raise the question if Google realizes that taking information out of context might be more a disservice than a useful enterprise.

Even if Google was not inside the IRC channel, many people log these things (just as they did Usenet, in which Google was also not inside). Yet, just as people’s notion of “public” in Usenet did not include persistent & searchable, i’m guessing that most IRC folks are also not really constructing each message as though it will go down on their permanent records.