| > "Why didn't they do it earlier?" is a fallacious argument. 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.