
Google humans.txt - Anon84
http://www.google.com/humans.txt
======
Sukotto
I was expecting something like

    
    
      Hi! Thanks for visiting us.
    
      Feel free to look around in:
         /accounts/o8/id
         /ads/preferences/html/
         /ads/preferences/plugin
         /alerts/manage
         /books/about
         /booksrightsholders
         /globalmarketfinder/*.html
    
         [snip]
    
      Please stay out of:
         /accounts/o8
         /aclk
         /addurl/image?
         /ads/preferences/
         /advanced_blog_search
         /advanced_group_search
         /adwordsresellers
         /alerts/
         /analytics/admin/
    
         [snip]

------
cromulent
<http://humanstxt.org/>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131692>

~~~
ry0ohki
Very cool, I've never heard of this before but really like the idea. Kind of a
tech secret to find out who's behind a site.

~~~
lostbit
I guess it was seen first time here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131692>

------
dude_abides
<http://www.bing.com/humans.txt> should be there in about 2 weeks

------
mrspeaker
Damn, I was hoping they'd implemented the humans.txt captcha to keep out
humans: <http://www.mrspeaker.net/2010/07/15/humans-txt/>

------
eschulte
no linebreaks? it's not animals.txt

gentlemen stay within 79 characters of the start of a line

------
bradya
The HTML5 boilerplate provides a boilerplate humans.txt

[https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/h...](https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/humans.txt)

------
Andrex
Gmail has one too, I noticed the other day:
<https://mail.google.com/humans.txt>

~~~
nametoremember
How did you notice it?

~~~
Andrex
With this Chrome extension:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pocdghmbbodjiclgin...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pocdghmbbodjiclginddlaimdaholhfk)

~~~
mmahemoff
Extension author here. This is great to hear - @RussenReaktor, who originally
spotted it, also discovered it with the extension [1].

There's also a Firefox extension [2] and the opportunity is there for someone
to make extensions for the other browsers.

[1]
[http://twitter.com/#!/russenreaktor/statuses/659089801862307...](http://twitter.com/#!/russenreaktor/statuses/65908980186230784)

[2] <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/humanstxt/>

~~~
listic
Thanks for informing us. Unfortunately, Firefox extension doesn't work for
Firefox <4.0

------
dexen
Just for the fun factor:
<http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/robots.txt>

(also, the comments in the source of the root page,
<http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/>)

------
nhebb
"Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots
..."

Wait, does that say "robots"? This is how it starts people, with a robot
creating a humans.txt text file, posing as a friendly Googler. Bill Joy must
feel so vindicated now.

~~~
iwwr
The Google motto is: "Robots scale, humans don't". Or otherwise, the resource
constraints and reproduction rates are not good enough.

------
ma2rten
Here is a google query that lets you find people's human.txt files
[http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Atxt+inurl%3Ahumans...](http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Atxt+inurl%3Ahumans.txt)

------
jarin
I think humans.txt is great, but it would be even better if the "standard" was
to use a human/machine-readable format like YAML. The example on the website
is really close to that.

Yes, I know it's an ironic request.

~~~
paulirish
Even at google we were debating how to structure a humans.txt.. and to make it
machine readable, etc.

Personally I say fuck it.. While machine-parseable would be nice, that's not
the point of this file.

More creativity without some sort of YAML constraint. In the HTML5 Boilerplate
ours has effing stars, bro:
[https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/h...](https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/humans.txt)

~~~
rch
How about some literate programming? You could even start the file with a
sentence like:

"Paul Irish last updated this text on May 6, 2011 using the Standard Grammar."

------
autalpha
<http://news.ycombinator.com/humans.txt>

Unknown.

\---- Awww... :(

------
drKarl
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=192...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1920&bih=1139&q=filetype:txt+humans.txt&aq=f&aqi=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw).

~~~
nametoremember
How is <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/humans.txt> the 4th result?
Google fail..

~~~
Hipchan
There was actually a question there. I wrote it. I asked whether or not
humans.txt is speciesist, and narrow minded. It's a reflection on our current
understanding of who our peers are. I felt that future generations would look
back on humans.txt with contempt. What might AI, aliens, or other hereto
undiscovered sentient organisms think? There are groups working on genetically
modifying dolphins to make them more intelligent. I wouldn't want them to feel
like they are second class citizens. I proposed people.txt.

Stackoverflow was probably not the right place for the question so it got
closed with extreme prejudice.

Probably should've tried LessWrong

~~~
Semiapies
Once we get to the point of AIs approaching sapience and/or aliens surfing our
internet, we can change it to people.txt.

Toaster jokes aside, I doubt AIs will identify more with primitive search
engines than other sapients.

~~~
Hipchan
I'm sure that's true, but I don't see why it would be unreasonable to use more
inclusive language from the beginning.

~~~
Semiapies
Reasonable and pursuable - on a site you run, you could make humans.txt
redirect to people.txt.

------
tlrobinson
<http://flickr.com/humans.txt>

~~~
notJim
I cry foul, unicorns and pandas are not humans.

~~~
tlrobinson
Unfortunately there's no pandas.txt or unicorns.txt

------
PhatBaja
Why is this the top article on HN? Is it really that relevant to talk about
this?

~~~
gabrielroth
It's an idea that was discussed here recently, and its adoption by Google is a
sign that it's got some traction in high-profile places.

------
jschuur
So basically, Google has too many people for them to be able to list them all.
Or Google didn't want to try and list them, thinking they might miss someone,
or subject them to poaching.

That seems to be a fundamental problem with humans.txt: The bigger, more
interesting a project gets, it creates several reasons why it will only
vaguely be able to lost anything, out of a conflict of interest, rather than
give full credit to the team behind the site.

------
sixtofour
<http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Ahumans.txt>

~~~
bauchidgw
better: "inurl:humans txt" filetype:txt

------
jonah
Not too much interesting in the headers. ;)

    
    
      x-content-type-options: nosniff
    
      Server: sffe [1]
    

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/sffe/> ?

~~~
rmccue
I doubt those are the same sffe.

~~~
jonah
Yeah, you're probably right. Am not seeing any reasonable references to it in
a quick search.

<http://www.google.com/notaurl> \- is also served via sffe.

[http://josephscott.org/archives/2010/11/user-agent-
sniffing-...](http://josephscott.org/archives/2010/11/user-agent-sniffing-at-
google-libraries-cdn/) \- as are the js libraries they serve.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2280319> \- @dmaz seems to think it's
google's static resource server.

------
cellis
Which reminds me of Google Code Jam ... which starts in 2hrs. I'm not really
expecting anything but i'll try the problems.

------
kennymeyers
The irony of the words contrasted with naming the file human.txt is not lost
on me.

------
chuckywhat
This is a pleasant surprise. Will also install the chrome ext. kudos

------
GMali
Apparently, Facebook does not have any humans.

------
dmor
Clever

------
jhonnycano
what is this for?

~~~
nose
<http://humanstxt.org/>

------
ignifero
Don't believe this, people. It's obviously planted evidence. We are not alone
...

------
hackermom
Why aren't programmers mentioned explicitly? :/

