In recent days, the community has been surprised by Google’s latest decision. The tech giant has begun requiring users to enable JavaScript. Google quietly updated its search box to demand that all users, including bots, have JavaScript turned on when performing searches.
If you currently browse Google Search with JavaScript disabled, you will see the following message: “Enable JavaScript to continue searching. The browser you’re using has JavaScript turned off. To continue with your search, turn it on.”
According to TechCrunch, this was Google’s response when asked about the issue: “Enabling JavaScript allows us to better protect our services and our users from evolving bots and forms of abuse and spam, …and provide the most relevant and up-to-date information.”
Google breaks down the data and says that fewer than 0.1% of searches are performed with JavaScript disabled. Although this figure may seem insignificant at first glance, when there are more than 8.5 billion searches per day, a large number of people can still be affected.
Why is Google doing this?
It appears one of Google’s motivations may be to inhibit third-party tools that provide information about Google Search trends and traffic. According to an article published in Search Engine Roundtable, several tools that track website performance in search engines started encountering issues with Google Search once this measure took effect.
One consequence of these blockages is the potential increase in resources needed for crawling, which could, in turn, lead to higher costs for SEO tools. On this point, Vahan Petrosyan, Chief Technology Officer at Search Engine Journal, commented:
“Google crawling with JavaScript requires more computing power. Often, a headless browser is needed to render the pages. This adds extra steps and increases hosting costs. The process is also slower because you have to wait for JavaScript to load. Google can detect this activity more easily, making it harder to avoid blockages. These factors make it expensive and complicated for SEO tools to simply ‘enable’ JavaScript.”
As might be expected, reactions on social media have been mixed and many people are not pleased with the decision: some users question the company’s technological dependency in making this call, while others—more extreme in their stance—are even considering abandoning Google’s search engines altogether in response to the new requirement.
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