Obama OverHauls Whitehouse.gov

The new media team in the Obama administration is letting search engines index almost everything on the White House site — a stark change from the last several years.

The Obama administration has promised transparency in government, and it’s already made a start with the White House site.

The BBC reports that the robots.txt file the Bush administration set up for Whitehouse.gov, which ran to almost 2377 lines and prevented search engines logging a lot of the data found on the site shrank to just two lines on the first day of the Obama administration allowing search sites to index everything it contains.

The site will also contain a blog – not written by Obama – which promises to "connect with the rest of the nation and the world."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has applauded the move and said:

"This is a big step in the right direction."