Yet another reason to stop supporting Google with your clicks. Remember when their moto was “Don’t be evil”?
Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
81–90 of 158 posts
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#82To 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…
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 logically fallacious, but shows that you don't experience dealing with adversarial application domains.
Adversarial problems, which scraping is, are dynamic and iterative games. The attacker and defender are stuck in an endless loop of game and counterplay, unless one side gives up. There's no point in defending against attacks that aren't happening -- it's not just useless, but probably harmful, because every defense has some cost in friction to legitimate users.
> My guess is it had more to do with squeezing out more profit from that supposed 0.1% of users.
Yes, that kind of thing is very easy to just assert. But just think about it for like two seconds. How much more revenue are you going to make per user? None. Users without JS are still shown ads. JS is not necessary for ad targeting either.
It seems just as plausible that this is losing them some revenue, because some proprortion of the people using the site without JS will stop using it rather than enable JS.
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#83[deleted]
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#84Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most black hat spammers use botnets, especially against bigger targets which have enough traffic to build statistics to fingerprint clients and map out bad ASNs and so on, and most botnets are low powered. You're not running chrome on a smart fridge or an enterprise router.
True, but the bad actor's code doesn't typically run directly on the infected device. Typically the infected router or camera is just acting as a proxy.
There are ways to detect that and it will still require a lot of CPU and ram behind the proxies.
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most black hat spammers use botnets, especially against bigger targets which have enough traffic to build statistics to fingerprint clients and map out bad ASNs and so on, and most botnets are low powered. You're not running chrome on a smart fridge or an enterprise router.
Chrome is probably the worst browser possible to run for these things, so it's not the basis for comparison.
We have many smaller browsers, that run javascript, that work on low powered devices as well.
Starting from webkit and stripping down the rendering parts just to execute JavaScript and process the DOM, the RAM usage would be significantly lower.
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#87They are going to make Google search even more broken than it is already? Be my guest! Since they are an ads business, I guess they don't really care about their search any longer, or they have sniffed some potential to gather even more information on users using Google, if they require running JS for it to work. Who knows. But anyone valuing their privacy has long left anyway.
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#88I believe the main intent is to block SERP analysers, which track result positions by keywords. Not that it would help a lot with bot abuse, but will make regular SEO agency life harder and more expensive.
Last month Google have also enstricted YouTube policies which IMHO is a sign, that they are not reaching specific milestones and that'd definitely be reflected over the alphabet stocks
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> which happens to be running on your computer.
not if you turn it off
Re: Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
#90Earlier 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…
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