Obama sets the web free

If the web seems a bit more friendly today than it did yesterday, you can thank the new US president, President Obama.

The Obama administration just brought into office today, have gone and done something to the White House official website.

By changing one small file, search engines are now free to roam the halls of the White House website picking up whatever they like and showcasing it the world.

Yesterday – and for the past few years – the Bush administration had elected to use their robots.txt file in a way that basically told search engines to go away, a segment of code that was worth 2400 lines that told search engines like Google and Yahoo what it wasn’t allowed to look at and index.

But all of that is gone with Obama and a new file has emerged today that basically lets search engines do what they’re supposed to do and index freely.

So now when you’re looking up something on the government, you’re less likely to come up empty handed.

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