Google's Nonstandard robots.txt is Not Valid

Googles robots.txt Does not validate

[forak]

Now, check out google's robots.txt.
I thought it was pretty clear to everybody that the Allow: tag was not correct...
If you try to validate [searchengineworld.com] www.google.com/robots.txt, you simply get an error that google uses the Allow: tag in its robots.txt!

Does this mean that googl'es agents actually use the Allow: tag?

[jatar_k]

it isn't a supported tag, doesn't mean they can't use it

[Dijkgraaf]

Well obviously they can and have used it, however they risk having other bots/spiders getting confused and disregarding all their rules.

[effisk]

a bit off-topic, but I see /search listed in google's robots.txt and if you look at these results: [search.msn.com...] you'll see a google search page listed there.
which means search.msn has indexed a disallowed url. It's funny to see a google result page listed in a microsoft one :)

The msnbot has probably indexed this link found on several other websites...

[Lord Majestic]

you'll see a google search page listed there.

Its a link that must have been found on one of the crawled pages elsewhere -- robots.txt only regulates which pages should NOT be retrieved, not which URLs should not ever be used to link to the site.

[PatrickDeese]

> which means search.msn has indexed a disallowed url.

I think your conclusion is wrong - MSN has not indexed the page, only the URL. Google will also show URL only results, even if they're banned via robots.txt