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Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

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Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#71

Post by supriyo-biswas »

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".

Your comment is interesting and there are some people doing work on this although not specific to browser automation, e.g. AWS Lambda SnapStart is just them trying to boot your Java Lambda code and freeze the Firecracker MicroVM's snapshot and then starting other Lambda functions from there.

However, even with a VM approach, you tend to lose out on the fact that you can make 100s or 1000s of requests on a small box (~512 MB) every second if it's just restricted to HTTP(s). However, once you're booting up a headless browser, you're probably restricted to no more than loading 3-4 pages per second.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#72

Post by gnfargbl »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #32
orf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

HN is usable w/o JavaScript. It doesn't block my access because I choose not to allow it to execute arbitrary code on my computer.

* execute arbitrary code in one of the best studied sandboxes on the planet, which happens to be running on your computer.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#73

Post by marcus0x62 »

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…

I run a not-very-popular site -- at least 50% of the traffic is bots. I can only imagine how bad it would be if the site was a forum or search engine.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#77

Post by _factor »

dageshi wrote: post #56
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a semi-popular website hosting user-generated content, although it's not a search engine; the attacks on it have surprised me, and I've eventually had to put in the same kinds of restrictions on it. I was initially very hesitant to restrict any kind of traffic, relying on ratelimiting IPs on critical endpoints that needed low friction, and captchas on the higher friction with higher intents, such as signup and…

There's a certain relatively tiny audience that has congregated on HN for whom hating ads is a kind of religion and google is the great satan. Threads like this are where they come to affirm their beliefs with fellow adherents. Comments like yours, those that imply there might be some valid reason for a move like this (even with degrees of separation) are simply heretical. I think these people cling to an internet ci…

The problem isn’t the necessary fluff that must be added, it’s how easy it becomes to keep on adding it after the necessity subsides.

Google was a more honorable company when the ads were on the right hand side only instead of tricking you in the main results. This is the enshitification people talk about. Decision with no reason other than pure profit at user expense. They were horrendously profitable when they made this dark pattern switch.

Profits today can’t be distinguished accurately between users who know it’s an ad and those who were tricked into thinking it was organic.

Not all enshitification is equal.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#78

Post by supriyo-biswas »

_factor wrote: post #67
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a semi-popular website hosting user-generated content, although it's not a search engine; the attacks on it have surprised me, and I've eventually had to put in the same kinds of restrictions on it. I was initially very hesitant to restrict any kind of traffic, relying on ratelimiting IPs on critical endpoints that needed low friction, and captchas on the higher friction with higher intents, such as signup and…

The problem is accountability. Imagine starting a trade show business in the physical world as an example. One day you start getting a bunch of people come in to mess with the place. You can identify them and their organization, then promptly remove them. If they continue, there are legal ramifications. On the web, these people can be robots that look just like real people until you spend a while studying their behav…

To be honest, I don't like initiatives towards a "verified web" either, and am very scared of the effects on anonymity that stuff like Apple's PAT, Chrome's now deprecated WEI or Cloudflare's similar efforts to that end are aimed at.

Not to say that these would just cement the position of Google and Microsoft and block off the rest of us from building alternatives to their products.

I feel that the current state of things are fine; I was eventually able to restrict most abuse in an acceptable way with few false positives. However, what I wished for was that more people would understand these tradeoffs instead of jumping to uncharitable interpretations not backed by real world experience as a conclusion.

Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

#79

Post by victorbjorklund »

palmfacehn wrote: post #42
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…

My impression is that there's less effort for them to go directly to headless browsers. There are several foot guns in using a raw HTML parsing lib and dispatching HTTP requests. People don't care about resource usage, spammers even less and many of them lack the skills.

so much more expensive and slow vs just scraping the html. It is not hard to scrape raw html if the target is well-defined (like google).
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