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Phew! Google prevents Terminators from killing Larry and Sergey

If you see a killer robot (including one that looks like a certain former California governor) making threatening movements toward Google's founders, there's no need to worry.

Eric Mack Contributing Editor
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Eric Mack

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This dude is totally not hunting Larry or Sergey. Video screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET

Pay attention, conspiracy theorists: The company that may most closely resemble SkyNet has taken action to preserve the lives of its founders if when the robot apocalypse finally comes, and the code has been hidden right under our noses on Web servers all over the world -- or at least on one of the most important Web servers in the world: Google's.

Google recently uploaded a new robots.txt file that humorously appears to try to stop the Terminators.

Robots.txt files are used by webmasters to kindly ask search engines and other bots to refrain from crawling their sites for whatever reason. As SearchEngineLand notes, the simple but useful little text file is recognized by most search engines, including Google, and just celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Perhaps recognition of this milestone is the real reason that Google uploaded the robots.txt file, which simply reads:

"User-Agent: T-1000
User-Agent: T-800
Disallow: /+LarryPage
Disallow: /+SergeyBrin"

That means that Larry and Sergey are covered in the case of attacks by the shape-shifting T-1000 from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" or Arnold Schwarzenegger's more classic T-800 model. Note that the directive does not protect Google's founders from the T-888 in the "Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles" series.

Apparently, no one cares about the well-being of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt in the event that SkyNet becomes sentient. Unless, of course, the truth is that all the robots report directly to him...