Intellectual Property Law

Will the Obama Adminstration Be More Open to Allowing Search Engines to Index Government Web Sites?

By Ann Bartow

From Kottke.org:

The country’s new robots.txt file

Here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! Here’s the new Obamafied robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

That’s it! BTW, the robots.txt file tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes.

Is this just accidental or temporary, or a real and sustainable effort at improving access to government information?  We shall see.

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on January 21, 2009 (boomark / email).