Editing IRC (section)

==Search engines==
There are numerous search engines available to aid the user in finding what they are looking for on IRC.<ref>{{cite book
| last        = Mutton
| first       = Paul
| title       = IRC Hacks
| edition     = 1st
| date        = 27 July 2004
| publisher   = [[O'Reilly Media]]
| location    = [[Sebastopol, California]]
| isbn        = 978-0-596-00687-7
| pages       = 44–46
| chapter     = Users and Channels
}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last      = Wang
 |first     = Wallace
 |title     = Steal this File Sharing Book
 |edition   = 1st
 |date      = 25 October 2004
|publisher = [[No Starch Press]]
 |location  = [[San Francisco, California]]
 |isbn      = 978-1-59327-050-6
 |pages     = [https://archive.org/details/stealthisfilesha00wang/page/65 65–67]
 |chapter   = Instant Messaging and Online Chat Rooms: Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
 |chapter-url       = https://archive.org/details/stealthisfilesha00wang/page/65
}}</ref> Generally the search engine consists of two parts, a "back-end" (or "spider/crawler") and a front-end "search engine".

The back-end (spider/webcrawler) is the work horse of the search engine. It is responsible for crawling IRC servers to index the information being sent across them. The information that is indexed usually consists solely of channel text (text that is publicly displayed in public channels). The storage method is usually some sort of relational database, like [[MySQL]] or [[Oracle database|Oracle]].{{Citation needed|date=January 2010}}

The front-end "search engine" is the user interface to the database. It supplies users with a way to search the database of indexed information to retrieve the data they are looking for. These front-end search engines can also be coded in numerous programming languages.

Most search engines have their own spider that is a single application responsible for crawling IRC and indexing data itself; however, others are "user based" indexers. The latter rely on users to install their "add-on" to their IRC client; the add-on is what sends the database the channel information of whatever channels the user happens to be on.{{Citation needed|date=August 2009}}

Many users have implemented their own [[ad hoc]] search engines using the logging features built into many IRC clients. These search engines are usually implemented as bots and dedicated to a particular channel or group of associated channels.