Whitehouse Blocks Iraq Web Searches

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Tuesday October 28, 2003 15:50 by techwatcher

The whitehouse utilizing a method for preventing indexing of certain files, has excluded all files on it own site with reference to Iraq from bing included in any of the well known search engines sucha s google. The motive is unclear but it points to a possible plan to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere.

This has been achieved by use of what is known as a "robots.txt". A file such as this when placed on the root of a webserver instructs web crawling programs, which build up search indexes for google and the like, to ignore ceratin files and directories. In the whitehouse.gov website's case it has a huge list of iraq related documents. To see for yourself goto http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt

The motives for this can only be guessed at but trying to purposefully obscure information and making it more difficult to find is a hardly meritorious conduct for a government.