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Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

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Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#121

Post by black3r »

puttycat wrote: post #34

I recently discovered how great the ChatGPT web search feature is. Returns live (!) results from the web and usually finds things that Google doesn't - mostly niche searches in natural language that G simply doesn't get. Of course, it uses JavaScript, which doesn't help with the problem discussed here. But I do think that Google is internally seeing a huge drop in usage which is why they're currently running for the…

can it find OLD articles? I generally don't like the idea of a search engine which requires me to be logged in to track my search history (and I do mostly use Google in incognito/private browser windows), but I might ignore that if it allows me to do the one thing that Google refuses to do on phones anymore (which might be a sign that they're gonna phase that out from desktop interfaces soon)..

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#122

Post by nibbles »

blindriver wrote: post #115

Almost everyone I know has moved a lot of their searching onto ChatGPT or WhatsApp AI querying. Everyone I know under 25 has stopped using Google search altogether. I think the only people disabling JavaScript must be GenX graybeards such as myself or security experts.

[dead]

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#123

Post by JohnMakin »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #99
JohnMakin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

thanks, captain google - the post I’m also responding to breaks a variety of site rules, weird how these types of people always jump in to post this exact thing and not take issue with the post being replied to at all. The fact this site is in denial about this problem is irrelevant to me - luckily that’s why there’s a downvoting/upvoting system. Note that I didn’t call him a shill, I am pointing out that the way the post was written looks like how a shill would post. Hope that is helpful to you.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#124

Post by altfredd »

oefrha wrote: post #117
altfredd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20000 RPS is very little — a web app / database running on an ordinary desktop computer can process up to 10000 RPS on a bare-metal configuration after some basic optimization. If that is half of your total average load, a single co-located server should be enough to eat entire "attack" without flinching. If you have "competitors" and I assume, that this is some kind of commercial product (including running profitabl…

This comment is so out of touch I’m almost speechless. > > critical, compute heavy endpoints through multiple exit nodes totaling ~20,000 RPS > 20000 RPS is very little If I had to guess you’ve never hosted non-static websites so you can’t imagine what’s a compute heavy endpoint. > Using Gmail should be a red flag on its own. Yes, ban users signing up with Gmail then. And this is not an isolated case, discussions on…

> you can’t imagine what’s a compute heavy endpoint

Indeed, I can't. Because "compute heavy" isn't a meaningful description. Is it written in C++? Are results persisted anywhere? Is it behind a queue? What is the caching strategy?

Given that original post mentions free Cloudflare tier, there is a good chance, that "compute" might mean something like "ordinary Python application, making several hundreds database requests". This is also a kind of high-load, but not the worst one by far.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#125

Post by marginalia_nu »

lozenge wrote: post #61
marginalia_nu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is that headless browsers use about 100x more RAM, and at least 10x more bandwidth and 10x more processing power, and page loads take about 10x as long time to finish (vs curl). Though these numbers may be a bit low, there are instances you need to add another zero to one or more of them. There's also considerably more jank with headless browsers, since you typically want to re-use instances to avoid in…

Is it possible to pause a VM just after the browser has started up? Then map it as copy-on-write memory and spin up many VMs from that "image".

... but then you have even larger overhead, as well as the added layer of complexity from managing VMs on top of headless browsers.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#126

Post by nonrandomstring »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #43
puttycat wrote: post #34

I recently discovered how great the ChatGPT web search feature is. Returns live (!) results from the web and usually finds things that Google doesn't - mostly niche searches in natural language that G simply doesn't get. Of course, it uses JavaScript, which doesn't help with the problem discussed here. But I do think that Google is internally seeing a huge drop in usage which is why they're currently running for the…

I've been experimenting with creating single-site browsers[1] for all websites I routinely visit, effectively removing navigational queries from search engines; between that and Claude being able to answer technical questions, it's remarkable how rarely I even use browsers for day-to-day tasks anymore (as in web views with tabs and url bars). We've been using the web (as in documents interconnected with links between…

As a serious computer user getting on for 25 years using text based search tools I've long made various "single-site" tools. A big inspiration way back was Surfraw [1], originally created by Julian Assange. Reality is, most of us use a small number of websites regularly. nearly all the info I want to touch is three keystrokes away on the command-line or from within emacs.

When search died, a few years ago practically now, I was still teaching a level-7 Research Methods course. The universities literally did not notice that all of the advice we gave students was totally obsolete and that it was not really possible to conduct academic research that way.

Research today is very much more like it was in the pre-interent era. You need to curate and keep in mind a set of reliable sources and personal, private collections.

Had the misfortune of needing to spend a week using a standard browser and sites like Google. It was beyond shocking. What I found I can only describe as a wastescape, a war zone, a bombed-out favela with burned out cars, overflowing sewers, piles of rubble and dead dogs lying in gutters.

My first thought was kinda, "Oh sweet Jesus Christ, what happened to my Internet?", and the very next one was "How does anyone get anything done now?" How does the economy still function? And of the course the answers are "They don't" and "It doesn't".

I think this is a really serious situation. There's simply no way that as "knowledge workers", scientists, or whatever people call us now, we can be as competitive as we were 10 or 20 years ago given the colossal degradation of our tools. We have to stop this foolish self-deception that things are "getting better". Google were a company that created free search. Well done. But that was then. We remain stuck in this strange mythology that advertising companies like Google and other enshitified BigTech are a net asset to the economy. Surely they're a vast parasitical drain and need digging into the ground so the rest of us can get on with something resembling progress?

[1] http://surfraw.org/

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#127

Post by supriyo-biswas »

altfredd wrote: post #124
oefrha wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is so out of touch I’m almost speechless. > > critical, compute heavy endpoints through multiple exit nodes totaling ~20,000 RPS > 20000 RPS is very little If I had to guess you’ve never hosted non-static websites so you can’t imagine what’s a compute heavy endpoint. > Using Gmail should be a red flag on its own. Yes, ban users signing up with Gmail then. And this is not an isolated case, discussions on…

> you can’t imagine what’s a compute heavy endpoint Indeed, I can't. Because "compute heavy" isn't a meaningful description. Is it written in C++? Are results persisted anywhere? Is it behind a queue? What is the caching strategy? Given that original post mentions free Cloudflare tier, there is a good chance, that "compute" might mean something like "ordinary Python application, making several hundreds database reque…

I won't be exactly saying what it is to maintain my privacy, but the compute heavy part of it is not your run out of the mill web traffic but rather performs some heavy processing of input files, this part is written in Go.

This function of the website is different from the user-generated content part of the website where the traffic resembles those of regular dynamic websites with database reads and writes.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#129

Post by supriyo-biswas »

JohnMakin wrote: post #123
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

thanks, captain google - the post I’m also responding to breaks a variety of site rules, weird how these types of people always jump in to post this exact thing and not take issue with the post being replied to at all. The fact this site is in denial about this problem is irrelevant to me - luckily that’s why there’s a downvoting/upvoting system. Note that I didn’t call him a shill, I am pointing out that the way the…

Such allegations are unfalsifiable and have no meaningful contribution to the discussion; and is similar to alleging someone is a "Nazi" just because they have an alternative opinion.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#130

Post by elicksaur »

blindriver wrote: post #115

Almost everyone I know has moved a lot of their searching onto ChatGPT or WhatsApp AI querying. Everyone I know under 25 has stopped using Google search altogether. I think the only people disabling JavaScript must be GenX graybeards such as myself or security experts.

Everyone I know under 25 hasn’t heard of chatgpt.
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