Google Adds Protection From Robots, Zombies
For this Halloween, Google modified its robots.txt file to prevent zombies from accessing the company’s brains. The protection is the same used against internet robots, or bots, for years.
The robots.txt file at the top level any site’s domain is used to maintain protection from various robots or automated processes. Today, Google’s is being used to ward off the undead from the site. Google’s concern for brain-eating zombies is warranted. Google is known for its braintrust, and Halloween is known for its surprising recurrence of zombies. The robots.txt edit represents a smart defensive move by Google and a devastating blow to zombie-kind.
It’s not known if this robots.txt modification will one day be accepted in Google’s robots-exclusion protocol, but I suppose it depends on how effective the internet’s zombie killing efforts are. The dream is to one day purge the internet of this virus once and for all.
The slight modification (easter egg) doesn’t affect normal humans or browsers from accessing and using Google services. To add your own robots.txt file and control site access to robots and zombies check out the Webmonkey Robots.txt tutorial.
[via Matt Cutts]
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