Daniel Micay on Twitter: "@RichFelker @saleemrash1d Too many sites are using tons of JavaScript, so they would be entirely opaque to it. There's a lot of blog and forum software that requires JavaScript to display any results at all. Earlier versions of Discourse couldn't show anything without JavaScript and it had wide adoption." / Twitter

twitter.com/DanielMicay/st This issue was finally resolved after Googlebot being stuck on Chromium 41 since 2015. Finally not going see errors in their webmaster tools from modern Content-Security-Policy, CSS, ES6, etc. webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/05/the-ne (pointed out to me by

@saleemrash1d

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Apr 28, 2019

developers.google.com/search/docs/gu > Googlebot uses a web rendering service (WRS) that is based on Chrome 41 (M41). So that's why it's incapable of handling grapheneos.org/releases.js for grapheneos.org/releases. Rendering with Chrome 41 in 2019 embarrassingly bad. It's from early 2015...

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I wonder how much of the awfulness of their search results this was responsible for.

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Honesty their results would be so much better if they used lynx to crawl.

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Too many sites are using tons of JavaScript, so they would be entirely opaque to it. There's a lot of blog and forum software that requires JavaScript to display any results at all. Earlier versions of Discourse couldn't show anything without JavaScript and it had wide adoption.

4:21 PM · May 8, 2019Twitter Web Client

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meta.discourse.org/t/is-a-javascr So for example, when Rust moved from a mailing list to Discourse, it was depending on Googlebot being able to handle JavaScript. There are countless other examples that often hurt their search indexing like nytimes.com comments, etc.

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I think the gradual move of tons of web content to heavily depending on JavaScript has had a major impact on their search results, largely due to Googlebot being stuck at a fork of Chromium 41 for so long. It also handled modern CSS very badly so it saw even pure HTML/CSS wrong.

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Exactly. Penalize sites that aren't accessible with -100% pagerank.

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I just want to be able to search that content. I also hope they start making better use of structured data. In theory github.com/GrapheneOS/gra is supposed to help search engines understand the content earlier on the page, but I think the only part Google understands is the logo.

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