Obama opens up WhiteHouse.gov to search engines

Obama is opening up WhiteHouse.gov to search engines, where the Bush administration has large chunks of it blocked off.

The BBC reports that while the Bush administration blocked huge chunks of WhiteHouse.gov from being indexed by search engines, the Obama administration has opened it up almost entirely.

The robots.txt file the Bush administration set up for Whitehouse.gov ran to almost 2377 lines and thereby stopped search engines logging a lot of the data found on the site.

On the first day of the Barack administration the robots.txt file shrunk to two lines allowing, for the moment, search sites to index everything it contains.

The new media team also created a Whitehouse.gov blog that will act as an informal record of events, speeches and decisions.

Combine this with the cool use of Creative Commons licensing on WhiteHouse.gov, plans to close Guantanamo, and smart, competent non-creepy people in is cabinet, and things are already a ton better.

I realize this hasn’t gotten us out of Iraq or created a million new jobs yet, but these are great steps at the beginning of a long journey.

Huzzah!

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And so it is begun

I still have two syllabi to finish, a research paper with a looming deadline, a messy office, and a huge to-do list.

But I have a President that doesn’t suck, and that ain’t a bad thing.

Cheers and best wishes to all. Check out WhiteHouse.gov; I know it’s all symbolic at this point, but it’s something to see his face and name there.

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