The 20th anniversary of robots.txt which, for those who have no need to use one, is a way of telling a search engine not to index all or part of a site. More formally known as The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or for most geeks just the: robots.txt protocol. To celebrate it looks like Google played a snarky joke and included the following directives in there's so that should SkyNet come alive they'll be safe:
————————————————
User-Agent: T-1000
User-Agent: T-800
Disallow: /+LarryPage
Disallow: /+SergeyBrin
————————————————
————————————————
User-Agent: T-1000
User-Agent: T-800
Disallow: /+LarryPage
Disallow: /+SergeyBrin
————————————————
You can see yourself by slapping http://www.google.com/killer-robots.txt into your browser (note their actual one is just http://www.google.com/robots.txt). What's that's basically doing is telling robots T-1000 and T-800 they can't touch +Larry Page or +Sergey Brin. HA!
I've seen some comments that leaves the door open for the T-600, T-888, and the T-1000000 (I'd never heard of this, apparently it's a Universal Studios attraction).
For more info check:
http://www.robotstxt.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en
Still don't understand why they aren't using "User-Agent: *" for future proofing, after all only killer robots are reading this file…..
Wow it's been 20 years.
HA! +Andrew Jones-McGuire.
and yeah… kinda crazy right +Matthew Shuey?
+Paul Spoerry I didn't start using robots files until 2007.I'm such a N00b
Well… unless you have a reason to specifically exclude something you might not have needed one prior!
I dunno, the SCC hinted at the end the T1000s were turning to our side. In trying to be too safe, they might lose their only significant ally.
DOH!