Carl Malamud on Robots.txt and the .Gov Top-Level Domain

I’m on the board of CommonCrawl.Org, a nonprofit corporation that is attempting to provide a web crawl for use by all. An interesting report just got sent to us about the use of robots.txt files within the .Gov Top Level Domain, a standard known as the Robots Exclusion Standard.

In examining about 32,000 subdomains in .gov, it turns at least 1,188 of these have a robots.txt file with a “global disallow,” meaning robots are excluded from indexing this content. Even more curious, on 175 of these sites, while there is a global disallow, there is a specific bypass that allows the Googlebot to index the data. You can look at the raw data on Factual.

At Public.Resource.Org, we’ve always felt that the use of a robots.txt file by the government should only be used for purposes of security and integrity of the site, not because some webmaster arbitrarily decides they don’t want to be indexed. Indeed, on several occasions we have deliberately ignored government imposed robots.txt files because we felt this was an arbitrary and illegal attempt to keep the public out.

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Source: O’Reilly Radar

See Also: This is not a new issue, we posted about it about 2.5 years ago.
Update: The site mentioned in the post linked above is now being crawled by Bing and Yahoo. However, as noted in the main posts sites still ban one crawler but allow another.