I disagree. the harder you make people find stuff, the more people will give up.
You can still search their website.
Quote:
Opt out email newsletters for instance. The ones that let you reply with "unsubscribe" are easy to. But the ones that that force you to go to a web site, find the page, then type in some code or your email address are doing so to make it much harder for you to opt out.
I'm still waiting for a post that explains to me why using government employees to go out of their way to block information from one of the largest search companies in the world is a good thing...
Why use government employees to even make the website anything more than a plain text page?
I'm sure typing a few lines in robots.txt took millions of taxpayer dollars.
Jan 13 XXXX i can go there and search the site and find out bush JUNIOR said X.
July 5 XXXX i can tell go back and type the same search results and not find what i found on Jan 13 XXXX.
Is this good?
Quote:
I'm sure typing a few lines in robots.txt took millions of taxpayer dollars.
Why? do it in the first place?
Let's not beat around the bush. They did this so they would limit their embarrassments down the road.
People doing research use google. Americans use google to find out more of the happenings of their government. For some "unknown" reason they will now have to search the whitehouse site separately because this president is afraid he will get caught in another lie.
I betcha lots of free projects will do just that. All i want is transparent access with 3rd party verification as to what the white house has posted/said in the past.
I'd settle for them to come out tommorow and say "oops we made a server boo boo" we fixed it and you can now google.
I don't think having google access to the most public web site in the world is wrong. hopefully this admin doesn't either...
I betcha lots of free projects will do just that. All i want is transparent access with 3rd party verification as to what the white house has posted/said in the past.
I'd settle for them to come out tommorow and say "oops we made a server boo boo" we fixed it and you can now google.
I don't think having google access to the most public web site in the world is wrong. hopefully this admin doesn't either...
Whoever controls the information in this day and age has the power. I doubt this administration (or any other, for that matter), is willing to relinquish that control.
I just have to mention what happened to me. I read somewhere yesterday that someone from the bush admin said the robots.txt had been changed to allow crawlers. I didn't check, but for some reason just believed it. Later in the day someone brought it up, and I added "but they changed it today." I gave the Bush admin credit. This morning, I go and check out http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and everything is still disallowed, with the exception of /infocus/iraq/. So that's all they changed.
So what did I learn from the experience? If you want to look like an ass, defend the bush admin. It doesn't matter how small the issue is, if the bush admin is involved, they try to get away with whatever they can. Of course, I knew that already, but I forgot it for a moment. Oh well. Carry on...
Comments
I disagree. the harder you make people find stuff, the more people will give up.
You can still search their website.
Opt out email newsletters for instance. The ones that let you reply with "unsubscribe" are easy to. But the ones that that force you to go to a web site, find the page, then type in some code or your email address are doing so to make it much harder for you to opt out.
Terrible analogy.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Search: "Iraq"
Results: 1632
I'm still waiting for a post that explains to me why using government employees to go out of their way to block information from one of the largest search companies in the world is a good thing...
Why use government employees to even make the website anything more than a plain text page?
I'm sure typing a few lines in robots.txt took millions of taxpayer dollars.
You can still search their website.
Not thru google. So what should arguablly be the site that should have the MOST access has less access then 99.9% of public sites out there.
Why should they be not able to when it comes to the whitehouse site?
Why use government employees to even make the website anything more than a plain text page?
If bushCo and his boss Cheney agreed to leave the frelling text alone and not try and rewrite history it could be plain text for all i care.
Terrible analogy.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Search: "Iraq"
Results: 1632
Missing the point complety.
Jan 13 XXXX i can go there and search the site and find out bush JUNIOR said X.
July 5 XXXX i can tell go back and type the same search results and not find what i found on Jan 13 XXXX.
Is this good?
I'm sure typing a few lines in robots.txt took millions of taxpayer dollars.
Why? do it in the first place?
Let's not beat around the bush. They did this so they would limit their embarrassments down the road.
People doing research use google. Americans use google to find out more of the happenings of their government. For some "unknown" reason they will now have to search the whitehouse site separately because this president is afraid he will get caught in another lie.
I'd settle for them to come out tommorow and say "oops we made a server boo boo" we fixed it and you can now google.
I don't think having google access to the most public web site in the world is wrong. hopefully this admin doesn't either...
Originally posted by groverat
Are those documents being removed? Are people not allowed to see them anymore?
As much as I'm with you that in thinking that this really isn't a big deal, the answer to your question is more than a little disturbing to me.
We cannot know whether documents are being removed, since there will be no archived, searchable record of that removal should they choose to do so.
Cheers
Scott
Originally posted by keyboardf12
I betcha lots of free projects will do just that. All i want is transparent access with 3rd party verification as to what the white house has posted/said in the past.
I'd settle for them to come out tommorow and say "oops we made a server boo boo" we fixed it and you can now google.
I don't think having google access to the most public web site in the world is wrong. hopefully this admin doesn't either...
Whoever controls the information in this day and age has the power. I doubt this administration (or any other, for that matter), is willing to relinquish that control.
http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/iraq-combat/
So what did I learn from the experience? If you want to look like an ass, defend the bush admin. It doesn't matter how small the issue is, if the bush admin is involved, they try to get away with whatever they can. Of course, I knew that already, but I forgot it for a moment. Oh well. Carry on...
I would like to officially apologize for that.
I'M SORRY.