In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Dirs excluded by whitehouse.gov robots.txt
Okay this is a little odd, and I have no idea about why, but the WhiteHouse.gov site is purposefully making it so external search engines can't find pages about Iraq on the WhiteHouse.gov website. What did Bush say about Iraq? Well the White House site doesn't want you to know.
This is sneaky. People would complain if the White House started taking stuff down off their site, so they aren't, they are just making it so you can't find the pages.
For those of you who are confused be this: Search engines, like Google or Alta Vista routinely scour many websites and index them so they can do fast searches and have those pages come up in the results. They even scour and index little itty bitty sites like this one (most of my traffic is from search engines). Well every site can, if it wants, include a file called robots.txt (click here for the actual robots.txt file of White House.gov). The file is useful because it tells the search engines what pages you do not want indexed. This is important because you may have pages you just don't really need to have indexed like a site map, or your privacy rules, or some directory this is only there for the programming of the site and is not to be seen.
But look at this page. Bush has problems with the truth and history, but this is just odd. It as if the White House is waiting for someone to say, "but you said Iraq was about WMDs" so they can answer, "oh yeah well Google WhiteHouse.gov and find where we said that." And then they rub their hands together and giggle insanely. I really don't get this.
Thanks to, Atrios, I think, for this link.
UPDATE: Kicking Ass has a good theory
Why would the White House do this? Those pages are still public, and the White House search engine itself does index those pages, so users can still get to them.
It's easy enough to understand the reasoning if you look at past White House actions. Earlier this year, the White House revised pages on its website claiming that "combat" was over in Iraq, changing them to say "major combat."
One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change — and were able to prove it — was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.
Still Orwell has been updated for the post-1984 technological advances.
- rob 12:51 PM - [PermaLink] -
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