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Comment by droidist2 | Hacker News Reader

> For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more.

What about sites built with React, etc? Like would you be filtering out cool things like Ableton's "Learning Synths"[1] or do you mostly mean third party scripts?

[1] https://learningsynths.ableton.com

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Yeah, those sited go out the window entirely. It's a search engine for documents, not applications.

Why should it matter if a website is marked up on the server side or client side to a search engine?

Why should I download 50M of Javascript implementing a buggy, bespoke browsing engine to render perhaps 1k of text when I'm using a browser that is already capable of rendering 1k of text? For example, I used to enjoy browsing the C2 wiki, but recently they decided they needed to experiment with their own Javascript based browser, thus rendering their site unreadable unless you are using the very latest web browser (that needs to be updated every 20 minutes mind you).

I don't know why it matters, but enforcing a JS budget turns out to rather effectively reduce the amount of problem websites down to nearly none.

Do babies go out with the bathwater? Almost certainly. But when you're running a small scale search engine, you're never going to index everything anyway, so that's entirely fine.

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