WebProNews

If the outgoing Bush Administration was thought to run a secretive, bubble-icious type of White House, the Obama Administration so far is proving to be the opposite. The Whitehouse.gov redesign for greater transparency has already been widely noted—Presidential blog and all—but the website is now much more open to a new kind of visitor: the search engine spider.

On Monday, Whitehouse.gov was still blocking search engine access to a tremendous amount of website information. In all, the robots.txt file used the “Disallow” command 2,400 times, blocking search engine access to information on earmarks, African American history, photo essays from various places and events, first lady initiatives, the budget, defense, on and on.

Obviously, if posted on the White House website, none of this information would be considered classified, or even sensitive, so it’s unclear why Bush’s web crew felt the need to prevent the site from being searchable.

Regardless, all search crawler barriers were removed with the Bushes’ furniture, the “Disallow” command lines reduced from 2,400 to basically none.

Requests for comment and/or explanations from prior and current administrations were not returned. Meanwhile, it appears President Obama will be able to keep his Blackberry after all—with some super-encryption functionality added to it.