Hacker News Reader

Comment by Figs | Hacker News Reader

> when the entire contents of the page - including the ads - is just a bunch of {canvas,WebGL} draw calls generated by a blob of obfuscated code.

Your site would also be unreadable by Google, meaning that you'll be heavily penalized in search ranking and no one will find your abomination of a website designed this way.

View on HN

Yeah, no.

Google is an ad company. They will simply open an API for content providers to push content into their search engine. They don't have to maintain their crawlers, users can't block their ads, and both Google and the content providers get more revenue. It's a win-win situation.

Oh, I forgot the users: they obviously lose! But hey, at least you can write rich applications :^)

>They will simply open an API for content providers to push content into their search engine

Ah, clickfarmers and adfraudsters will welcome that with open hands.

Obviously, it will be protected via client certificates.

If it becomes the norm Google crawler will start running the pages and looking at the content.

It already does

Google crawler can already index client side rendered react apps

People never had any problem finding Flash and Silverlight websites.

Hmm... How exactly do you know that? I can only think of a handful of full Flash sites I ever used, and of those, I learned of them from word-of-mouth advertising, not through a search engine. (e.g. Homestar Runner). There could have been tons of relevant sites locked up in Flash navigation (back when that was fad) that I never found out about because of their poor SEO -- the world would look the same to me whether they existed or not...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com