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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

I believe they're doing a meta-tag redirect (possibly inside a noscript tag?) in at least some cases. Source: I'm developing a web engine that doesn't have JS support.

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That's exactly what they are doing:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head><title>Google Search</title>...</head>
      <body>
        <noscript>
          <meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=..." http-equiv="refresh">
          <div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=...">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div>
        </noscript>...

You're correct.

    <noscript><meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=a3qIZ42cGcvcp84P5p_mwQI" http-equiv="refresh"><style>table,div,span,p{display:none}</style><div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=a3qIZ42cGcvcp84P5p_mwQI">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div></noscript></header>

Here's a skeleton overlay.js for an old style firefox extension to mitigate the meta-redirect part of the blocking.

    var remover = {
        init: function() {
            var appcontent = document.getElementById("appcontent");
            if(appcontent) {
                appcontent.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", 
                    function(e) {
                        var doc = e.originalTarget;
                        if(doc instanceof HTMLDocument) {
                            var noscripts = doc.getElementsByTagName('noscript');
                            for(var i = 0; i < noscripts.length; i++) {
                                //if(noscripts[i].innerHTML.indexOf('meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=') != -1) {
                                    noscripts[i].parentNode.removeChild(noscripts[i]);
                                //}
                            }
                        }
                    }, true);
            }
        }

};

window.addEventListener("load", function() { remover.init(); }, false);

Have you tested this? I don't think this will help much because you'll just get a page that requires JavaScript to function.

This won't help indeed, the noJS page now is only this redirect and contains no search results.

It’s a blank page with one line of text: “Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds”.

That depends. It works on setups where google still gives you the old html results but not one setups where it sends you to the js application. So on 3 out of 5 of my desktop setups it works. On the ones where, for some reason, google only sends me to the JS app, it doesn't work like you suggest, or, it does, but I'm just left looking at a blank page.

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