Google Now Searches JavaScript 114
mikejuk writes "Google has been improving the way that its Googlebot searches dynamic web pages for some time — but it seems to be causing some added interest just at the moment. In the past Google has encouraged developers to avoid using JavaScript to deliver content or links to content because of the difficulty of indexing dynamic content. Over time, however, the Googlebot has incorporated ways of searching content that is provided via JavaScript. Now it seems that it has got so good at the task Google is asking us to allow the Googlebot to scan the JavaScript used by our sites. Working with JavaScript means that the Googlebot has to actually download and run the scripts and this is more complicated than you might think. This has led to speculation of whether or not it might be possible to include JavaScript on a site that could use the Google cloud to compute something. For example, imagine that you set up a JavaScript program to compute the n-digits of Pi, or a BitCoin miner, and had the result formed into a custom URL — which the Googlebot would then try to access as part of its crawl. By looking at, say, the query part of the URL in the log you might be able to get back a useful result."
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Googlebot will have a very quick timeout on scripts and probably wont be more powerful than a standard home computer. How would that be useful for calculating digits of pi or bitcoin mining? It would take far longer than doing it the conventional way.
so much for (Score:5, Insightful)
using javascript to hide or obfuscate email addresses to help protect them from spammers, scammers and bots.
thanks fer nuttin, google.
Re:Incremental and/or parallel computing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your JS would generate HTML on the client side. Just generate a link that your server can understand. Google bot, doing what it does, will try to load this URL. When it does, the server stores this result, and generates a new problem for GoogleBot to solve. This is the basis, for the article and the entire comment thread.