The White House is in danger, and this time the enemy comes from within.A bigmouthmedia technical report has identified a potentially crippling technical weakness at the heart of the US Presidential office's internet strategy. If not addressed, the critical error threatens to have an insidious effect on George W. Bush's campaign to win the hearts and minds of the online public.
In a report published today, our in-house analysis team reveals that the official White House website's robots.txt file - which acts as an index guide to the site - is becoming so large that the welter of information published by the Oval Office is in danger of disappearing from the world's search engine results. If unchecked, the crucial file could soon reach the point of no return, exceeding Google's maximum cut-off size of 100kb and becoming so large that it may be inappropriately terminated by the search engine's technology.
Crucially, the bigmouthmedia report warns that if the maximum file size for whitehouse.gov's news directory is exceeded, an entire range of content published within it could be blocked from the majority of search engine spiders.
Vital tech issues, such as net neutrality and technology education, have been playing an unprecedented role in the run-up to this year's US Presidential elections, with tech sites and industry blogs profiling each candidate's credentials on IT issues. In fact, in 2007, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all gave talks at the Googleplex, Google's company headquarters in Mountain View, California.
What's more, influential tech blog Techcrunch gave Obama and McCain their endorsement for "Tech President" live on Fox News on January 29. But which candidate will be able to save the White House website?
Andrew Girdwood, Head of Search at bigmouthmedia, commented:
"The White House bans search engines from some parts of their website but allows them to read and index content from other parts. Problems will arise when the 'banned list' gets too large. The search engines will not be able to cope and Google's been known to truncate instructions midway through. When that happens, a whole section of whitehouse.gov could vanish from search rather than just the pages the White House intended to block."
Read the full report: "Crucial White House website flaw uncovered"
