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White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling

Posted by simoniker on from the intriguingly-specific dept.

oscarcar writes "Dan Gillmor is reporting on the White House website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere."

5 of 837 comments (clear)

  1. ummm, ok... by Voytek · · Score: 0, Troll

    "possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere."

    Yeah, that's not a baseless accusation at all...

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 0, Troll

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Re:A CLASSIC QUOTE... by letxa2000 · · Score: 0, Troll
    The whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.

    Kind of like...

    /firstlady/recipes/iraq

    ... which is one of the entries in the robots.txt file in question? Is it possible, dare I say probable, that /firstlady/recipes/iraq never existed?

    Or how about these highly classified directories that the White House doesn't want anyone to crawl...

    /agencycontact/iraq
    /easter/iraq
    /egov/iraq
    /firstlady/photoessay/bookfestival/iraq
    /history/africanamerican/iraq
    /history/tours/iraq
    /history/valentines/iraq
    /holiday/2002/pageant/iraq
    /infocus/dontcall/iraq
    /infocus/illegal-logging/iraq
    /infocus/perutrip/iraq
    /kids/barney/iraq

    You know... the liberals that are going bonkers looking for a conspiracy here are just plain comic relief. It is 100% obvious that someone made an error when building the robots.txt file. Or do you think there is a lot on the topic of Barney for Kids in Iraq? Or an Iraqi don't call list? Or the problem of illegal logging in Iraq? Or the history of African Americans in Iraq? Or how about Easter in Iraq?

    Come on knee-jerk liberals... This time your knees jerked your feet right into your respective mouths. :)

  4. Re: and your ... by CycleMan · · Score: 0, Troll
    real, detailed, complete examination of government behaviour, with equal air time to truly dissenting opinions (how many times has Chomsky been on CNN in the past 4 months?) is out of the question

    On the way to the loony bin, don't forget your tinfoil hat. Alternatively, you could turn on NPR and hear nothing but the horrors and evils of the current administration.

    You troll.

  5. It's obvious by letxa2000 · · Score: 0, Troll
    The submitter linked to Dan Gillmor's Journal who got this whole sorry joke from (drum roll) the blog at Democrats.org.

    There is nothing to see here! But it's fun watching liberals go apeshit over it anyway. :)