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Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

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Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#131

Post by elicksaur »

orf wrote: post #23
pluc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no need for JavaScript on a page that has a text input and two buttons and that has worked without JS for three decades. Given Google's reputation for privacy and the constant attempts at selling their users out, it's fair to assume that the reason they're requiring JavaScript is not noble.

> There's absolutely no need for JavaScript on a page that has a text input and two buttons The whole web is evil then. Hacker news has JavaScript for simple upvote buttons, is it also evil?

You miss the point. non-necessity =/= evil, but it does require a non-evil reason. JavaScript could be used on a site for some neat rendering or game where it’s necessary to do that neat thing. Without such a need, the person is inferring the change now is likely nefarious based on other actions from the same company and their motives.

I’m not necessarily agreeing with the OP, but I can understand their point without naively misconstruing it.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#132

Post by kragen »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #25

To be fair, if my search engine is anything to go on, about 0.5-1% of the requests I get are from human sources. The rest are from bots, and not like people who haven't found I have an API, but bots that are attempting to poison Google or Bing's query suggestions (even though I'm not backed by either). From what I've heard from other people running search engines, it looks the same everywhere. I don't know what Googl…

Maybe you could require hashcash, so that people who wanted to do automated searches could do it at an expense comparable to the expense of a human doing a search manually. Or a cryptocurrency micropayment, though tooling around that is currently poor.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#133

Post by blharr »

elicksaur wrote: post #130
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.

How is that possible?

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#134

Post by supriyo-biswas »

kragen wrote: post #132
marginalia_nu wrote: post #25

To be fair, if my search engine is anything to go on, about 0.5-1% of the requests I get are from human sources. The rest are from bots, and not like people who haven't found I have an API, but bots that are attempting to poison Google or Bing's query suggestions (even though I'm not backed by either). From what I've heard from other people running search engines, it looks the same everywhere. I don't know what Googl…

Maybe you could require hashcash, so that people who wanted to do automated searches could do it at an expense comparable to the expense of a human doing a search manually. Or a cryptocurrency micropayment, though tooling around that is currently poor.

The only issue with a hash cash is there’s no way to know whether the user’s browser is the one who computed said proof of work, or has delegated it to a different system and is simply relaying its results. At scale, you’d end up with a large botnet that receives proof of work tokens to solve for the scraping network to use.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#135

Post by marginalia_nu »

shiomiru wrote: post #104
jsnell wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why didn't they do it earlier?" is a fallacious argument. If we accepted it, there would basically only be a single point in time where a change like this could be legitimately made. If the change is made before there is a large enough problem, you'll argue the change was unnecessary. If it's made after, you'll argue the change should have been made sooner. "They've already done something else" isn't quite as logica…

> "Why didn't they do it earlier?" is a fallacious argument. I never said that, but admittedly I could have worded my argument better: "In my opinion, shadow banning non-JS clients from result computation would be similarly (if not more) effective at preventing SEO bots from poisoning results, and I would be surprised if they hadn't already done that." Naturally, this doesn't fix the problem of having to spend resour…

> Is JS necessary for ads? No.

JS is somewhat necessary for ads, they're not in anyway needed for displaying them, but instrumental in verifying that they are actually being displayed to human beings. Ad fraud is an enormous business.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#136

Post by kragen »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #134
kragen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could require hashcash, so that people who wanted to do automated searches could do it at an expense comparable to the expense of a human doing a search manually. Or a cryptocurrency micropayment, though tooling around that is currently poor.

The only issue with a hash cash is there’s no way to know whether the user’s browser is the one who computed said proof of work, or has delegated it to a different system and is simply relaying its results. At scale, you’d end up with a large botnet that receives proof of work tokens to solve for the scraping network to use.

I don't see that as a problem; it still imposes the botnet rental cost on the spammer or whoever.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#137

Post by mike_hearn »

jsnell wrote: post #82
shiomiru wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's such a common issue, I would've thought Google already ignored searches from clients that do not enable JavaScript when computing results? Besides, you already got auto-blocked when using it in a slightly unusual way. Google hasn't worked on Tor since forever, and recently I also got blocked a few times just for using it through my text browser that uses libcurl for its network stack. So I imagine a botnet us…

"Why didn't they do it earlier?" is a fallacious argument. If we accepted it, there would basically only be a single point in time where a change like this could be legitimately made. If the change is made before there is a large enough problem, you'll argue the change was unnecessary. If it's made after, you'll argue the change should have been made sooner. "They've already done something else" isn't quite as logica…

It can't lose them revenue. Serving queries is expensive, getting rid of bots yields immediate and direct savings measured in $$$

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#138

Post by dotancohen »

hedora wrote: post #106
dotancohen wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That brings up an interesting conundrum. If PoW were implemented, could known-valid (i.e. goodstanding for over a decade) accounts be switched over to PoS instead? Or paying accounts? PoW could be written into infrequent pages such as the registration page and reset password page. It could run while the user fills in the form. I might implement this on some sites that get attacked.

This gives me an idea: thanks to anti-spam mechanisms residential proxies + headless browsers provide a better experiences than regular browsing on real devices. Instead of PoW, maybe just make the clients prove they are capable of proxying browser sessions?

We're not far from having VPN robots intercept our browsing, solve the captchas, close all the popups, remove all the ads, reformat the page to be comfortable to read, and send it over the airwaves using less bandwidth.

I would pay for a VPN that does this, I could imagine this being the next iteration of Opera's VPN.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#139

Post by jsnell »

mike_hearn wrote: post #137
jsnell wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why didn't they do it earlier?" is a fallacious argument. If we accepted it, there would basically only be a single point in time where a change like this could be legitimately made. If the change is made before there is a large enough problem, you'll argue the change was unnecessary. If it's made after, you'll argue the change should have been made sooner. "They've already done something else" isn't quite as logica…

It can't lose them revenue. Serving queries is expensive, getting rid of bots yields immediate and direct savings measured in $$$

I was using the word "revenue" very deliberately. Savings don't increase revenue.

The GP's argument was that this was about "squeezing out more profit from that supposed 0.1% of users". That can't be an argument about resource savings. The resource savings come from not serving bots, not from blocking legitimate users who happen to have disabled JS.

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