Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
No offense intended, but why are you still using Google? Startpage has anonyomized results from Google. DuckDuckGo is good enough for most people as well. Brave search also exists if you don’t mind supporting that shitty company.
I love that society is basically stratifying into groups based on tech knowledge - it all seems very Cyberpunk.
The more technology pervades society the more pronounced this will get. The sheer helplessness of people when faced with problems that seem trivial to some is scary. Especially when you see people losing final theses or critical work related data because they never learned about backups.
Add to that tech companies trying to hide the concept of a file system, and it seems like this is by design to sell more shit.
As someone with technical knowledge sometimes I get locked out of things because I block ads or refuse Javascript. For instance, I had to turn off my pihole so I could sign into my Microsoft account to play Minecraft. Or the times I encounter a website that breaks on Firefox.
If you’re getting locked out of those things, those things are not worth using
I’m pretty sure my divorce lawyer’s document management system is something that’s worth using even if I have to use chrome and disable ad blocking.
I like the SearX search engine. It gives old-school, relevant search results, not google ranked ones.
It’s also spread out over many separate instances, so you can pick the one that best suits your search needs:
It’s open source and can be self-hosted. I use something similar called Whoogle that I run in a local Docker container. Strips ads, javascript, tracking, and amp links
I know this may come off as a surprise: but I imagine that requiring JS in 2024 isn’t a big deal to most people.
Now of course Lemmy skews more into that small crowd.
I don’t blame any website for requiring JS for full functionality in 2024.
It’s far more than that. Even on a basic search page. Ever expanded the ‘Peaplo also ask’ section, for example? It loads more results based on your scroll position or interaction.
There’s loads of little things like this, you may just not notice or care about it - which is another discussion.
This is an optional feature. The core search functionality does not require JS.
All of the people replying to this saying you shouldn’t need JS are totally unaware how modern web development works.
Yes, you could do many sites without JS, but the entire workforce for web development is trained with JS frameworks. To do otherwise would slow development time down significantly, not allow for certain functionality to exist (functionality you would 100% be unhappy was missing).
Its not a question of possibility, its a question of feasibility.
My question is if it wasn’t required before and is required now, what changed? It’s not like Google has added a killer feature recently - this is almost certainly related to those shitty AI answers that are forcing your actual search results even further down the page than they were already.
It wasn’t required, but id wager 99% of website that exist currently run JS in some form or another for something.
Id wager its impossible to have anything dynamic on a webpage without JS (minus visual dynamics which can be handled with css), at that point you have to replace it with a different programming language and every browser needs to completely change gears to allow other code to run instead. But what advantage is gained by changing to another programming language? Cleaner code w/ less jankyness? Sure I guess, but we would be moving mountains to accomplish a silly thing.
I’m wondering if many people in this thread understand what JS is and does.
Even things like lazy loading and such require js though
A lot of features might not be obvious honestly
If you’re interested though, you could check the source which should be able to tell you immediately what they use it for
I wish JS would die and we get nice and simple websites back. I hate web dev so god damn much. The internet is pure enshittification
For full functionality sure. For basic functionality no. Searching on Google is basic functionality I’d say.
Not really. Showing ads and gobbling up data is Google Search’s core functionality, and JS is indispensible for that.
Idk if you were around when Google popped up, but it was at a time where the internet was feeling increasingly “loaded” with thousands of info per page. One where the popular engines tried to serve you twenty different things along with your search. Here’s an example:
https://www.definitions-seo.com/images/altavista-3.jpg
Or another:
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/timeline/yahoo/yahoo-2003.png
This isn’t a search engine. This is an all you can eat buffet, where the smallest plate is two main courses and three sides. And users just wanted a candy bar.
So you see, a lot of us started to use Google because it was simple. It was decluttered. It was a text input with a ‘submit’ button, and that’s all we wanted. THAT is, and was, google’s core functionality, and I think it’d do them well to remember that.
Now, if you wanna argue that’s changed, I can agree to that. But I don’t want morning news when I search for porn, that’s just gonna kill my boner. And I don’t want ads about coffee makers when I’ve just bought a coffee maker, that just means you’re incompetent. I want a search engine that searches things and provides results. That’s it. And just like Google caught momentum because they delivered this minimalistic facade that the users wanted, this is also how Google will die - at the hands of the next lightweight engine without corporate bullshit. Because the users will gobble it up.
I’ve been happy with Qwant lately, they have their own index so using them doesn’t support the Google + Bing hegemony. They’re also EU based and regulated by the gdpr.