Comment by shiomiru

Given that curl-impersonate[1] exists and that a major player in this space is also looking for experience with this library, I'm pretty sure forcing the execution of JS using DOM stuff would be a much more effective deterrent to prevent scraping.

[1] https://github.com/lwthiker/curl-impersonate

I have been web searching using Google from the command line, with no Javascript, for decades. Until last week I never sent a User Agent HTTP header either. After this change I'm still searching from the command line, no Javascript. Thus "requiring Javascript" is not a correct phrase to describe this change. The requirement is a User Agent HTTP header with an approved value. The only difference in searching for me as of the last few days is that I now send a User Agent HTTP header, with an "approved" string.

Javascript does not stop bots. At least it does not stop Googlebot.

IMO, the change is to funnel more people (cf. bots) into seeing AI-generated search results. The "AI" garbage requires Javascript. That is why the spokesperson suggests "degraded" search results for people who are not using Javascript. For me, the results are improved by avoiding the AI garbage, not degraded.

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

If we accepted it, there would basically only be a single point in time where a change like this could be legitimately made. If the change is made before there is a large enough problem, you'll argue the change was unnecessary. If it's made after, you'll argue the change should have been made sooner.

"They've already done something else" isn't quite as logically fallacious, but shows that you don't experience dealing with adversarial application domains.

Adversarial problems, which scraping is, are dynamic and iterative games. The attacker and defender are stuck in an endless loop of game and counterplay, unless one side gives up. There's no point in defending against attacks that aren't happening -- it's not just useless, but probably harmful, because every defense has some cost in friction to legitimate users.

> My guess is it had more to do with squeezing out more profit from that supposed 0.1% of users.

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.

It seems just as plausible that this is losing them some revenue, because some proprortion of the people using the site without JS will stop using it rather than enable JS.