whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

[Declan McCullagh]

> This robots.txt issue was exaggerated by leftist crtitics of the
> administration. (This is not a general defense of the White House,
> just a statement of fact.) The Bush WH.gov server has a special Iraq
> section where press releases, speeches, etc. are reposted in a
> different HTML template. The WH only wants the "master" copy indexed
> and not the duplicate copy in the second template. Hence the apparent
> weirdness in robots.txt.
>
> I have not found any skullduggery going on, though I suppose it
> wouldn't hurt to keep a copy of the Iraq section for "diff" purposes
> just in case.
>
> -Declan
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:59:07PM +0200, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:56:24PM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> > > Can somebody with a webspider crawl these documents, and put it up
> > > on the web?
> > >
> > > http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
> >
> > All or nearly all of them are duplicates of same documents
> > elsewhere in the directory tree; "X/text/" and "X/iraq/" are
> > supposed to be copies of "X/", with images removed in the first
> > case. I suspect that downloading them all would just confirm that.
> >
> > --
> > avva