Here’s a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here’s the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin

Disallow: /search

Disallow: /query.html

Disallow: /omb/search

Disallow: /omb/query.html

Disallow: /expectmore/search

Disallow: /expectmore/query.html

Disallow: /results/search

Disallow: /results/query.html

Disallow: /earmarks/search

Disallow: /earmarks/query.html

Disallow: /help

Disallow: /360pics/text

Disallow: /911/911day/text

Disallow: /911/heroes/text

And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! Here’s the new Obamafied robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /includes/

That’s it! BTW, the robots.txt file tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes. (thx, ian)

Update: Nearly four months later, the White House’s robots.txt file is still short…only four lines.