[nostrademons]

I'm betting that they finally solved the scalability problems with headless WebKit. Google's been able to index JS since about 2010, but when I left in 2014, you couldn't rely on this for anything but the extreme head of the site distribution because they could only run WebKit/V8 on a limited subset of sites with the resources they had available. Either they got a whole bunch more machines devoted to indexing or they figured out how to speed it up significantly.

[tracker1]

I'd say both are pretty likely.. another round of lower-power servers with potentially more cores... more infrastructure... Combined with improvements in headless rendering pipelines. I haven't looked into it in well over a year now, but last I checked dynamic updates took about 2-3 days to get discovered vs. server-delivered being hours for a relatively popular site.

I'm guessing they've likely cut this time in half through a combination of additional resources, and performance improvements. Wondering if they'd be willing to push this out as something better than PhantomJS... probably not as it's a pretty big competative advantage.

I know MS has been doing JS rendering for a few years, they show up in analytics traffic (big time if you change your routing scheme on a site with lots of routes, will throw off your numbers).