Google Search Now Requires JavaScript

I still use DuckDuckGo HTML or DuckDuckGo Lite for the same reason I liked the basic Google search experience, it's fast and less filled with senseless junk. I miss the Gmail basic html interface that was discontinued sometime in the last year too, it was fast and just worked. Oh well. Times change and largely get worse.

Another reason to dislike Google. Google renders incorrectly in all browsers that work on my old mac (which I have no intention of throwing away). If they're going to pull stunts like this, they should make sure their shit is backwards compatible.

The discussion on Hacker News linked to by Gruber's article was useful... I got it to work without JS by changing my palemoon user agent to "Links (2.29; Linux 6.11.0-13-generic x86_64; GNU C 13.2; text)". Cool.

If this makes life harder for seo people (which it apparently does) then I'm all for it.

The good news is that this particular "scriptwall" is implemented by the noscript tag. So it looks as though you can just use a content blocker to deny external fetches and cookies and it will still actually work. I don't imagine this trick will last for long though because it's just a matter of time before all the SEO creatures start deploying headless browsers to do their thing. Sigh.

I haven't been using Google for Web searches for a few years now, but I recently learnt that if you append &udm=14 to your search string, you get served a 'pure' text-based results page, like it used to be in the (g)olden days of Google. (Via udm14.com, which can be used to input searches directly and automatically appends the &udm=14 parameter).

Thanks @Riccardo.

In addition to what Riccardo mentioned, I also suggest appending &tbs=li:1 to the search URL too, so altogether: &udm=14&tbs=li:1

The latter bit switches it to "verbatim" mode, which means it will only return results that contain all of the words you actually searched for. You know, what you actually want it to do!

Those two options together make Google searches almost as good as they were fifteen years ago.

To streamline this, I have my browser set up so that I can use !g as a prefix for a Google search, and automatically take me to a results page that has &udm=14&tbs=li:1 in the URL.

Hm.

I don't mind requiring JS on a website _per se_. I don't usually find that people have good reasons to object; it makes me feel a bit like "I want to not wear a mask / continue driving an ICE car into the 2040s / etc." stubbornness.

OTOH, this line nails it:

>But the bottom line is that with this change, Google Search is more of an app than it is a website.

Google Search is now a web app. It doesn't technically seem to be an SPA just yet, but it might as well be. Looking at the page source, I don't even know what to call it. It isn't clean, it isn't structured, it's just a garbled mess of CSS, JS, base64-encoded assets, and some pieces of HTML. A search result's title isn't an anchor element; it's a div with three obfuscated classes, some inline CSS, an accessibility role that one might argue isn't correct, oh, and probably hidden underneath some JS onclick handler to pretend it behaves like a hyperlink.

(div class="n0jPhd ynAwRc MBeuO nDgy9d" aria-level="3" role="heading" style="-webkit-line-clamp:3")Smartwatch im Test: Wie gut misst die Smartwatch meinen Puls?(/div)

I'm also with Gruber on this:

> Post 2010-or-so Google is a company that sees the web as a de facto proprietary platform that it owns and controls. Those who experience the web through Google Chrome and Google Search are on that proprietary not-closed-per-se-but-not-really-open web.

I think that's exactly what it is. Apple has iOS and macOS, Microsoft has Windows (and wishes it had Windows Phone), Google has Android and the Web. It's _their_ pretend-open platform.

I don't mind _in this specific case_, but it is indeed a far cry from the early days where Google's strength was arguably being a very simple, straightforward web site that gave you results. Now, it's very complicated, and may or may not be accurate.

(I often use verbatim to help me out, and wish that feature were more prominent. I worry they're gonna remove it. But I also often find myself writing typo-heavy text and being happy that Google figures out what I meant. So, I wouldn't personally want verbatim as the default.)

Entirely off-topic: when I did a test search, Google decided to log me in with my company account. Why? Oh, and as per usual, it presented the results in a language I did NOT ask for. My browser sent "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9", but Google thinks it's smarter than my browser and gave me German instead.

Please. Stop. Trying. To. Be. Clever.

Sören:

> It doesn't technically seem to be an SPA just yet

It’s been a SPA (submitting the form is handled in JS) for at least five years.

> but it might as well be. Looking at the page source, I don't even know what to call it. It isn't clean, it isn't structured, it's just a garbled mess of CSS, JS, base64-encoded assets, and some pieces of HTML. […]

It's been that way for at least twenty years.

The distinction between “site” and “app” is finicky in general (even what is a “SPA” isn’t agreed upon), but requiring JS sure isn’t the line. Every site behind Cloudflare or similar DDoS protection service that might ask for a captcha isn’t considered an app.

> My browser sent "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9", but Google thinks it's smarter than my browser and gave me German instead.

There’s more misconfigured en-US browsers than there are legitimate en-US consumers outside the US, so it’s good UX even if it’s infuriating to the latter group.