Re: The Web Page
Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 25 Sep 1996 20:06:39 -0700 (PDT)
About xmca discussions being available on the web. In my personal opinion,
this is only a major problem when the archived discussions can turn up in a
search of the Web using Alta Vista or some similar tool. If you send a note
to xmca thinking out loud about Vygotsky and Fairbairn, you don't want that
note to turn up when someone decides to find out what information exists on
the Web about Fairbairn. Fortunately, as I mentioned way back when we had
this discussion before, there are conventions on the Internet for asking
so-called spiders to leave certain Web pages alone; search engines like Alta
Vista work by sending a program called a "spider" looking around the Web at
night, reading all the pages and indexing all the words that appear on them.
No software author is *obliged* to overlook pages that wish to repel spiders,
but all of the commonly used search engines respect this protocol.
For what it's worth.
Phil Agre