Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I don't know what Google's ratio of human to botspam is, but given how much of a payday it would be if anyone were to succeed, I can imagine they're serving their fair number of automated requests.
Requiring a headless browser to automate the traffic makes the abuse significantly more expensive.
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.
Running a headless browser also means that any differences in the headless environment vs. a "headed" one can be discovered, as well as any of your Javascript executing within the page, which significantly makes it difficult to scale your operation.
There's also considerably more jank with headless browsers, since you typically want to re-use instances to avoid incurring the cost of spawning a new browser for each retrieval.
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.
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 password reset pages.
Other than that, I was very liberal with most traffic, making sure that Tor was unblocked, and even ending up migrating off Cloudflare's free tier to a paid CDN due to inexplicable errors that users were facing over Tor that were ultimately related to how they blocked some specific requests over Tor with 403, even though the MVPs on their community forums would never acknowledge such a thing.
Unfortunately, given that Tor is a free rotating proxy, my website got attacked on one of these critical, compute heavy endpoints through multiple exit nodes totaling ~20,000 RPS. I've reluctantly had to block Tor, and a few other paid proxy services discovered through my own research since then.
Another time, a set of human spammers distributed all over the world started sending out a large volume of spam towards my website; with something like 1,000,000 spam messages every day (I still feel this was an attack coordinated by a "competitor" of some sort, especially given a small percentage of messages entitled "I want to get paid for posting" or along those lines).
There was no meaningful differentiator between the spammers and legitimate users, they were using real Gmail accounts to sign up, analysis of their behaviours showed they were real users as opposed to simple or even browser-based automation, and the spammers were based out of the same residential IPs as legitimate users.
I, again, had to reluctantly introduce a spam filter on some common keywords, and although some legitimate users do get trapped from time to time, this was the only way I could get a handle on that problem.
I'm appalled by some of the discussions here. Was I "enshittifying" my website out of unbridled "greed"? I don't think so. But every time I come here, I find these accusations, which makes me think that as a website with technical users, we can definitely do better.
It's if nothing else very evident most people fundamentally don't understand what an adversarial shit show running a public web service is.
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 circa 2002ish and the solution to all problems with the modern internet is to make the internet go back to 2002.
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.
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 behavior. Worse if they’re real people being paid for sabotage.
In the real world, you arrest them and find the source. Online they can remain anonymous and protected. What recourse do we have beyond splitting the web into a “verified ID” web, and a pseudonymous analog? We can’t keep treating potential computer engagement the same as human forever. As AI agents inevitably get cheaper and harder to detect, what choice will we have?
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.
Regarding Tor nodes — there is nothing wrong with locking them out, especially if your website isn't geo-blocked by any governments and there are no privacy concerns related to accessing it.
If, like Google, you lock out EVERYONE, even your logged in users, whose identities and payment details you have already confirmed, then... yes you are "enshittifying" or have ulterior motives.
> they were using real Gmail accounts to sign up
Using Gmail should be a red flag on its own. Google accounts can be purchased by millions, and immediately get resold after being blocked by target website. Same for phones. Only your own accounts / captchas / site rep can be treated as basis of trust. Confirmation e-mail is a mere formality to have some way of contacting your human users. By the time Reddit was created it was already useless as security measure.
> > 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 DDoS, CAPTCHAs, etc. here always have these out of touch people coming out of the woodwork. Baffling.
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.
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.
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 using curl wouldn't last very long either.
My guess is it had more to do with squeezing out more profit from that supposed 0.1% of users.
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.
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 resources on serving unsuccessful SEO bots that the existing blocking mechanisms (which I think are based on IP-address rate limiting and the UA's HTTPS fingerprint) failed to filter out.
> 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.
Is JS necessary for ads? No. Does JS make it easier to control what the user is seeing? Sure it does.
If you've been following the developments on YouTube concerning ad-blockers, you should understand my suspicion that Search is going in a similar direction. Of course, it's all speculation; maybe they really just want to make sure we all get to experience the JS-based enhancements they have been working on :)
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.
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.
Javascript does not stop bots. At least it does not stop Googlebot.
IMO, the change is to funnel more people (cf. bots) into seeing AI-generated search results. The "AI" garbage requires Javascript. That is why the spokesperson suggests "degraded" search results for people who are not using Javascript. For me, the results are improved by avoiding the AI garbage, not degraded.
Lynx/2.8.6rel.5 libwww-FM/2.14This seems like yet another example of Google and friends inviting the problem they're objecting to.
Search engines which require JavaScript:
Google, Bing, Ecosia, Yandex, Qwant, Gibiru, Presearch, Seekr, Swisscows, Yep, Openverse, Dogpile, Waldo
Search engines which do not require JavaScript:
DuckDuckGo, Yahoo Search, Brave Search, Startpage, AOL Search, giveWater, Mojeek
With Google search’s new landing page for those without JavaScript enabled, even if you enable JavaScript and reload, it just gives you the same ‘fail’ page. No matter what you do at that point Google deletes your search string and you need to retype it.
Just changed my default search to DDG and I’ll be looking into Kagi.
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 money. We're going to see this all across their products soon enough (I'm thinking Gmail).
We've been using the web (as in documents interconnected with links between servers) for a great number of tasks it was never quite designed to solve, and the result has always been awkward. It's been very refreshing to move away from the web browser-search engine duo for these things.
For one, and it took me a while to notice what was off, but there are like no ads anymore, anywhere. Not because I use adblockers, but because I simply don't end up directed to places where there are ads. And let me tell you, if you've been away from that stuff for a while, and then come back, holy crap what a dumpster fire.
The web browser has been center stage for a long while, coasting on momentum and old habits, but it turns out it doesn't need to be, and if you work to get rid of it, you get a better and more enjoyable computing experience. Given how much better this feels, I can't help but feel we're in for a big shift in how computers are used.
[1] You can just launch 'chrome --app=url' to make one. Or use Electron if you want to customize the UI yourself.
Surely it would make more sense to use bookmarks?
Web Browsers have a sort of inner platform tendency where they roll their own window management, and it just gets very messy and integrates incredibly poorly with the window management of the operating system.
You can open CI in your browser to see how your build is progressing, and in the same window, with a few keypresses, check your private email and then go buy new tires for your car, file your taxes, and after that go watch some porn.
Web browsers are streamlining an undesirable type of context switching: These are all tasks from separate domains, and I don't understand why it would be desirable that all of these things are easily accessible from the same window at the same time.
Having dedicated launchers opening specialized windows allows for a sort of workspace mise-en-place that makes interacting with the computer much more focused and deliberate. Each tool has its place and function.
It’s great if this separation works for you and your current setup, but what does prevent future you from building muscle memory to quickly switch back to porn when you want to procrastinate your taxes?
Though I actually set up different user accounts for different tasks, then only add shortcuts for the tools that are in any way relevant for the given context. This creates deliberate friction when context switching, and requires upfront intent when selecting what I do. It's not that anything is off limits per se, but all undesirable state changes are made awkward. I simply can't check my email from my programming account, or check the build status on my social media account.
If I want to go from monitoring a build on CI to e.g. paying the bills, I'd have to log out from the work account and shut everything down, then log into the business account, and open the bank SSB. This makes doing these particular tasks as easy as ever, but directionless task switching a serious pain in the ass.
I am aware that a lot of people use searches as a form of navigation, but it’s also very common that people use bookmarks, speed dial, history, pinned tabs, and other browser features instead of searching. My Firefox is configured to not do online searches when I type into the address bar, instead I get only history suggestions. This setup allows for quick navigation, and does not require any steps to set up new pages that I need to visit.
What I want to say that while you seem to imply that you found a different pattern of use that many people will soon migrate to, I think these patterns have always been popular. People discover and make use of them as needed.
It’s also strange that you put such a negative sentiment on interconnected documents. Do you not realize how important these connections were for you to be able to reach the point you are at now? How else would you have found the things that are useful to you? By watching ads?
Search engines are also … really not really a good example of the strengths of the interconnected web, as they are mostly a one way thing. Consider instead a Hacker News discussion about a blog, and some other blog linking to that discussion, creating these interconnected but still separate communities and documents.
This is specifically in the context of getting things done, not e.g. reading an interesting article for the enjoyment, but as an indirect means accomplish a task.
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?
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
Object content as lazy
Embed lazy
Image lazy
Link rel=import (not support that widely though)
Heck if you wanted to get REALLY cute you go use multipart-mixed-replace headers.
Or SSE
But I guess the point is that the code in the service worker could have been on the server instead?
The trick seems to be using a template element with a slot and then slotting in the streamed content at the end. But you could probably also do it using just CSS to reposition the content from the bottom to the top, similarly to how many websites handle navigation menus, assuming that the client supports CSS.
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.
completely unhinged take. Everyone I know under 25, as someone under 25, uses Google search at least an order of magnitude more than they use AI querying.
In contrast, this is less evil: https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/
But as usual, nobody really cares because it’s also useful and convenient, even if there’s a bunch of ad crap and fingerprinting and tracking and other stuff, basically taking away more and more control over how you want to consume the contents of a site, same as DRM.
Contrast that to a static site (or a server side rendered one to a lesser degree) which is more like a newspaper - if you have it, you can read it, cut out bits that you’re interested in, stash them away for safe keeping etc.
The more nuanced answer is that most technologies aren’t inherently evil or good but it depends on how they’re used. Even then the answer still leans towards “yes”.
The whole web is evil then. Hacker news has JavaScript for simple upvote buttons, is it also evil?
not if you turn it off
I’m not necessarily agreeing with the OP, but I can understand their point without naively misconstruing it.
BTW hackernews requires javascript for collapsing threads, despite it can be achieved with checkbox/css or with the summary element. The reddit frontend teddit used it, and it worked really well. HN is basically the same as reddit, so it would work really well for HN too.
What every last commercial site uses it for IS evil, without a doubt.
Especially when it’s foundational to how the site runs, e.g. the typical way how Vue, React or Angular are used.
Google.com search now refusing to search for FF esr 128 without JavaScript
A.k.a ads
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=kagi&sort=byPopularity
Possibly one of the most reviewed SaaS companies here.
And yes, it's pretty great. But it's just Search (with some AI tossed in).
Incidentally, Kagi works with JavaScript disabled.
For me, it's worth every cent.
That's akin with a response to some incident where companies "Take [user security etc.] seriously", when the immediate thought is, yeah, but if you did, that [thing] probably wouldn't have happened.
Dunno why I wrote all that - I don't use Google search, because I wanted to enhance (aka unenshitten) my search experience.
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.
Instead of PoW, maybe just make the clients prove they are capable of proxying browser sessions?
I would pay for a VPN that does this, I could imagine this being the next iteration of Opera's VPN.