Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript in order to use Google Search, possibly in an effort to block certain SEO tools.
Google begins recommending DuckDuckGo.
That or Startpage
Or SearXNG. I run an instance, you can check it out: search.gregtech.eu
At this point I’ve been using DDG for 7 years as my main search engine. It’s gotten better while Google has become a joke.
Can confirm. I didn't think it'd be like that but it do be like that. DDG gang, where you at.
So, you're saying Bing got better.
I don’t know the full story about how Microsoft is developing Bing, but I do know that Google made a conscious decision to make their search results worse, simply so that you’d search more times, which for them translates to additional ad revenue. But, my sense is Bing hasn’t gone this far yet.
DuckDuckGo: The coolest way to use bing and apple maps.
(I do use it though)It's not only the results, though, but other features too
Can't wait until they enshittify, the way I see it, everything will eventually, even Lemmy. It's up to us to not settle too hard in one place
No, I don't think that's sustainable, nor is it sustainable to act as if it were true. Given the lack of resources we have compared to Google or Meta et al., the only way to make it work is to stick with something for the long run, and bake in protections in both the technology and the organisational structure. Being opensource and federated goes a long way there, there's no real reason why something not for profit would have to enshittify. But people won't put in the effort to keep building it if they think that's inevitable.
The core of what you're saying has been my approach for many years. Never go "all in" on anything.
Convenience is one thing (to me, but it's everything to so many), but it's just one factor. And if it means I am (or my data is) the product, it costs too much.
They need to fix the minus syntax/feature. That's my singular complaint.
I remember interviewing at Google years ago (if you're keeping score, it was 2012/2013 just before their stock hiccupped and my onboarding was killed as I was only a 97% fit), and the guy was religious about page load times. "We cut 200 lines of code if it'll give us a millisecond of page load speed", that kind of thing.
How they've fallen.
well they don't need to fight for new users anymore. Everyone uses it already, and children are basically indoctrinated to it: all schools have that as search engine, often they even use google classroom and drive and whatnot on the classes. if they have chromebooks, the chrome browser automatically starts after login even if you don't want to use it, and you can't unpin it from the taskbar either
Feels good not to care anymore about the unrelenting enshittification of Reddit, Twitter and Google since I switched away from them.
Cool. As if the over-promotion of AI garbage wasn't enough of a reason to stop using it.
I didn't know they allowed you to search without JS before. If you're at the point of disabling JS, presumably for security or privacy reasons, why not just use DDG which works perfectly well without JS?
Old browsers.
Doing this to combat bots like they aren't also using bots to scrape data from the internet is interesting.
I wonder how this affects modified/custom search engines (like udm14).
Udm14 is just a query parameter to open google with the "web" results tab. Still works.
I know, but I have it set as a custom search engine and what I'm saying is, if someone were to use it in chrome would it still require them to enable java. I think that answer is that it would. I don't use chrome so I'm not gonna test it.
why no one quotes searx instances? https://searx.space/
or even paid search engines : kagi.
Isnt literally the first Q&A that is REQUIRES Js?
Kagi is good
DuckDuckGo
Kagi too.
I like the results, especially for research. Definitely worth it for me.
Yacy Run your own alternative. With the possibility p2p that others find your crawled pages the other way around. Screwed in p2p that you only get results from others but don't share any yourself. Complete island mode - no p2p takes place and can also be operated offline locally. You control the crawler, the results well just anything.
Kagi for me
MetaGer
"Ehrnagawd! Meta ger!" - Slid Snack
If the British civil service, even operating under previous administrations, can put together a multi-functioning government domain that runs reasonably well without JavaScript, there's no reason Google can't continue to do the same with a ducking web search.
The former works better with JavaScript, that's true, but it works OK without and that's the point.
Then again, the civil service were ordered to do it largely out of spite because the government didn't want to give the plebs any excuse for not being able to use the site.
I'm not sure how to get Google to lose the need for scripting in the same way.
I think this isn't a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don't want to let the few people that don't have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.
It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can't let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.
🥱
I fucking hate how these companies get so bloated and then start doing whatever the fuck they want.
the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive
I hope we aren't talking forms and input fields, right?
Me, to Google right now:
May I suggest https://mojeek.com as a privacy respecting alternative that actually has its own web crawlers and indexers.
While I love the idea of Mojeek, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
do you have any examples? they're always useful for us when it comes to targetting improvements etc.
Never use google to search. There are many other options and all of them are better than google.
I don't know about better but people just start understanding that going to the guy with the largest market share is saying that you are satisfied with being abused by a monopoly.
There other options, use 'em
If only I could replace YouTube...
Being a parasite is the Google business model
yt-dlp direct to > peertube. Never google/yt again, i would prefer books instead cooperate with them
If I have to go back to using Excite, I will.
Like, I'm tired of Google Search, it's always been shit. I'm tired of it's AI Generalization, tired of it's garbage results, tired of the stupid section of questions asked by 'people' with these low-hanging fruit and softball but dumb questions there is to be asked.
Not like I was using it to search anyway
I've been using search xng for about 6 months now. It's been great
Honestly, JS is such a core part of the web, I'm surprised it took this long.
There is no need for any JS to simply POST a query to a web server, and receive an HTML response. This is to force tracking, ad, and AI bullshit on people.
Google is a lot more than just the one google.com page. And even if it were, JS adds some nice features like predective text / suggested searches.
Tracking, ads, and AI can be done without JS. They may be slightly less granular in the same way as the user experience will be slightly worse, but disabling JS won't stop it.
I'd bet the biggest reason Google decided to do this is so that they don't have to support a version of the site that virtually nobody uses.
Imo, the most compelling reason for non-JS versons of typically JS-driven sites is to support lower power devices. But it's 2025 and even a 10 year old phone you found in a dumpster behind a decaying Radio Shack can run modern websites without issue.
Even the article is grasping at straws for why this might be bad. "It might make accessibility more difficult or add security issues". One of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the best engineers in the world, is going to have problems adding aria attributes and updating dependencies? Give me a break.
If you want to block tracking, ads, and "AI", there are plenty of ways to do that without disabling literally all JS. If you want to construct your google search request without the rest of the stuff on google.com, use your browser's search bar.
I'm as anti-google/tracking/etc as the next guy, and I've been using DDG almost exclusively for years, but I'm not going to pretend like asking companies to make HTML/CSS-only versions of their sites is a reasonable request in the modern web environment. It can be really fun and cool to build a site without JS, but there aren't many scenarios where it's actually beneficial.
The replies in this thread are just plain ignorant. Basically every website uses JS heavily and disabling all JS with something like noscript is just a plain bad time.
Even in your comment, every sentence is wrong. Google searches are done with GET requests, and there are plenty of reasons to force JS other than tracking, ads, and ai.
One logo, one input field, one button, nothing requires JS. They could have kept a simple solution for disabled people but they don't even care about that.
