On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 12:06:25PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > > As you may know, Google's mission is to deliver the best search
> > > experience on the Internet by making the world's information universally
> > > accessible and useful. Currently, our Google.com site is within the top
> > > 10 sites in all major markets worldwide with over 200 million searches
> > > per day.
> > >
> > > We believe that www.debian.org is a great site and have discovered that
> > > Google is currently blocked from crawling your site by the robot.txt
> > > that is on your site. I believe we can drive a lot of traffic and
> > > awareness to your organization and would like to find a mutually
> > > beneficial way to work together.
> >
> > How's that? http://www.debian.org/robots.txt says only:
> >
> > User-agent: *
> > Disallow: /security/
> > Disallow:
>
> What's the purpose of the empty Disallow ?
To allow everything else. (I looked it up at somewhere at www.robotstxt.org
before posting :)
> > I'm not sure why we ban /security/, but otherwise it should be perfectly
> > possible to crawl the remaining 773 MB of www.debian.org...
>
> I wanted to look at the CVS log to find a possible reason but this file
> is not managed by CVS. :-|
Oh, indeed, we should probably commit it then.
> I really don't see why we keep that Disallow, it's not a dynamic site
> with infinite recursion or anything like that. Sure it changes often but
> that's not a big problem imho ...
Yeah. I'm trying to think of the deep subliminal reason why the security
exclusion is there... :)
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
