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Does Google execute JavaScript?

stephanboyer.com

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#51

I'm convinced that Google has several Googlebots that are run depending on how popular a site is. That is, new and low traffic sites are crawled by less intelligent bots, and as the site gets more visitors or better rankings, more complicated and resource intensive bots are deployed. How this might work with the most popular sites out there, the Amazons and Wikipedias of this world - I'm not so sure about that. If I…

I recently put a little browser for themes for the hyper.app terminal online ( https://hyperthemes.matthi.coffee ). It was just something I used to try out Elm, and there's no reason to believe Google would regard it as anything different than a generic new site. If you look at Google's cached version, you can see that the JS is executed (although it fails trying to download the actual data): https://webcache.googleu…

> If you look at Google's cached version, you can see that the JS is executed

Correct me if I am wrong but when I look at the cached version of the homepage (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hN5yCky...), I don't see that the JS has been interpreted.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#52
post #37
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did not kill Flash. Chrome came bundled with Flash already installed. Apple made the biggest push to kill Flash and once support for HTML5 video was solid and widespread the main use case for Flash was gone. Java applets just always sucked and only masochists/sadists ever used them.

Adobe killed Flash itself, not Apple, not Chrome,not anti-flash troll X or Z on the internet.

Eventually, they pulled the lever, yes.

But Adobe touted Flash on mobile as some kind of essential technology, when it was 100% crap.

If Apple offered it on iOS, Adobe would have been milking it to this day...

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#53

While google is certainly the main search engine most people use, isn't it to some point also very important what other engines such as bing, yandex, baidu etc. do. If you have a professional website you want to be found also by these other engines. Until also these support javascript you may end up with a hybrid SEO architecture anyway which means nothing was gained?

>If you have a professional website you want to be found also by these other engines.

Do you really? Except if you are interested in the Chinese market.

In fact the inverse is probably more true: if you run one of those other search engines, then you want to be as good at indexing any particular site as Google is.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#54
I wonder what Google does to avoid indexing too many pages. There are a fair number of SPAs and software like shopping carts that have a large number of checkboxes, pulldowns, knobs, dials, etc...that both change the content and the current url query params.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#55

My pet theory is that Google actually developed chrome as a web crawler and that consumer release was to ensure that Google would always be able to crawl pages (since sites would always want to work properly with chrome) It also explains why they effectively killed flash and Java applets. They were competing technologies that weren't owned by Google and not crawlable. If they would have taken off, Google's position a…

Nope, Googlebot has been able to crawl Flash for almost a decade: http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing...

and Chrome supports Flash out of the box!

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#57
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently put a little browser for themes for the hyper.app terminal online ( https://hyperthemes.matthi.coffee ). It was just something I used to try out Elm, and there's no reason to believe Google would regard it as anything different than a generic new site. If you look at Google's cached version, you can see that the JS is executed (although it fails trying to download the actual data): https://webcache.googleu…

> If you look at Google's cached version, you can see that the JS is executed Correct me if I am wrong but when I look at the cached version of the homepage ( http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hN5yCky... ), I don't see that the JS has been interpreted.

The "Network error" in the top left is a JS result. Also, since you linked to the source view, you'll see that there actually isn't anything in the body but the script being loaded, whereas "Full version" shows the user interface was correctly initialised.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#58
post #8
post #3

My pet theory is that part of the anonymous usage data Chrome sends back, is digested page contents that go into pagerank. And such browser level digesting would be on rendered pages (after JavaScript execution.) I have no other reason to believe it is true other than it's what I would do to distribute the job of crawling the web to my users if i were Google :-)

Yeah, it would make sense. There has to be more reason to giving people a free web browser other than just that it uses Google search.

The reason is Google's interest in advancing the web platform. They're afraid of content migrating into either native apps or Facebook, and Chrome is their (somewhat successful) attempt to make the open web competitive.

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#59
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is unlikely because then SEO specialists would generate and send such data to improve the positions of their websites. But Google could use this to discover new URLs that are not linked anywhere.

Some URLs are private by design, so I think it would be an awfully bad idea to discover new URLs in this way.

Chrome by default searches Google with whatever you type in the top bar - so by not disabling that private URLs are sent to them and then are scanned (however if the correct robots.txt file is setup on those URLs then Google Crawlbot would stop at that point).

I believe it was this setting (I have it disabled as well as other options - however I believe it's only this option that sends data back) [1].

[1] https://i.snag.gy/cmkGzp.jpg

Re: Does Google execute JavaScript?

#60
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some URLs are private by design, so I think it would be an awfully bad idea to discover new URLs in this way.

There were cases when such private URLs got into search engines. You should protect such URLs with authorization or at least hide them behind a POST form. Or block them with robots.txt. Also if a user follows a link from such page, the URL would be leaked via Referer header so it is not secure anyway.

I feel robots.txt is the most effective to prevent a private site from being crawled by Google followed up by an inline tag.
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