Re: [LINK] Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search

Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:
>

On 24-Jan-25 3:33 am, Ivan Shmakov wrote:

On 2025-01-21, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:

  >>> How is this going to '"better protect" Google Search against
  >>> malicious activity, such as bots and spam'?
  >> I believe the idea is that if the robot doesn't speak
Javascript,
  >> it's an easy denial by the web server.  And making bots speak
  >> Javascript is one step up.  And with Javascript they can likely
  >> monitor things like mouse movement to detect whether the user
  >> is a human or a robot.
  > Which of course is one of Google's main businesses, with their
  > Captchas that don't always need to show a puzzle in order to
  > validate users as humans.  So if anyone _thinks_ they can achieve
  > that, you'd expect it to be Google.
And they don't even need it to be perfect: a robot that
implements the relevant browser APIs, while possible, /will/
be costlier to run and maintain, thus reducing the profits of
the robot operators, in turn disincentivizing them.
Even if that doesn't solve the problem altogether, it will
still likely result in less load for their servers.
Not that it invalidates any other reasons they might want to
require Javascript / APIs regardless, mind you.

>
A bot only needs to be able to send the correct data to the
server. how difficult that is obviously depends on the details of the
Javascript's interactions with the server, but frequent interactions
themselves create a higher server load.
>
One example would be the mouse-movement based human detection. If the
script just sends a yes/no message to the server, then the bot doesn't
need to try to emulate a human at all.
>
Sylvia.

>
That's useful. I set my Seamonkey user agent string to a Lynx user agent
string and now google search works without javascript.