The Wikipedia Hive Mind Chat Room

Some Wikipedians live in a swamp. It's called the IRC channel #wikipedia, and anyone can visit through freenode. Currently this engine searches logs beginning January 2008 through May 2008. The reason we made this engine is because there are occasional bits of information that fly by in this chat channel that Wikipedia watchers find helpful. But it's also a tremendous waste of time to sit there and monitor the channel. The solution is to get logs and make them searchable.


A modest little engine, but you will
be amused by its presumption.

This engine searches hundreds of text files, each of which averages about 50 kilobytes. It can handle only one or two terms in the search box. If you violate this limitation and use three or more, it will treat it as a single term inside of double quotation marks. This will probably mean that you won't get any hits.

A term is a string of characters without a space. The space is used to separate the two terms. However, if you want a term that includes spaces, then force it to be defined as a single term by putting it inside of double quotation marks. Now you can add a second term if you wish. Each term must be three or more characters.

So far this is like Google, except for the limitation of two terms. Where it is unlike Google is that this engine will hit on strings inside of words. It does not index each file as a collection of words, but instead scans lines of text for matching characters. For example, each line leads with a date and time. Depending on how far into the date and time you specify, you can use your first term to limit the search to a particular month, or ten-day period, or specific day, or even a specific hour or minute.

Three lines of context are shown for every hit. A link to the text file is on top. To see more context, go to the text file and use your browser's "find" to locate some text from the hit. Now you have about 50K of context, or about two hours of chat logs.

If your search does not produce any hits, a few seconds later this engine will pass your search to Scroogle. Use your back button a couple of times to get back to the Hive Mind for another search.


browse the logs:    Jan    Feb    Mar    Apr    May


IRC hostmask search engine

This engine searches over 36,000 hostmasks from several popular IRC channels used by Wikipedians. These were collected from IRC logs in 2006-2008.


browse by IP address:    0-24   25-63   64-66   67-68   69-70   71-74   75-80

81-82   83-84   85-86   87-91   92-141   142-195   196-206   207-213   214-255


Who owns that IP address?

Below you can enter a single IP number to find the name of the owner. This search also allows you to use one or two keywords for a corporation or organization that may own IP blocks, and it will show you up to 500 matches. Try entering "defense agency" (without the quotes) — or, for that matter, "intelligence" or "enron." Use quotation marks only if you want to force two words to appear together as one keyword, or to force a leading and/or trailing space on initials or short words. This search is limited to ten per hour per user.




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