Ask HN: So Google blocked non-JS browsers, workarounds?

4•lynx97•4mo ago

Last time this happened was at least 6 years ago. Back then, a rant of mine got enough traction on HN to convince a Google dev to make Lynx wrk again.

This time, the UI explicitly mentions unsupported browsers, which likely means no non-JS version anymore. I wonder, does anyone with a little bit more Google-Fu know a workaround that might still work? If no, whats the cheapest (API) way to get searching via Google back to the terminal?

Comments

JohnFen•4mo ago

Is this about the search engine? Why not use a different one? Google's search isn't any better than the others, and is worse than a few of them.

lynx97•4mo ago

Tried marginalia... New web interface does some kind of proof of work as well, so had to switch to old-search. 6 hours later, marginalia was down/unavailable. Probably picked a bad moment in time, but no, that wasnt similar nor equal.

boars_tiffs•4mo ago

try

SearX; gets its results from a number of search engines, can be customised to work only with google.

StartPage; pulls results from google search anonymously.

TorstenK•4mo ago

https://searx.com/ (if I got the URL correctly) requires JavaScript. Unlike Google, https://startpage.com/es/q=<search string> (secured HTTP mandatory) doesn't accept Umlauts in strings. Translations are unavailable, such as http://google.com/search?q=on+a+particular+base+translate+Ge... did. (Pure translation services require JS for results to be rendered, altogether.) Third, StartPage's result pages are ten times bigger than Google's were. Viktor Lofgren's https://old-search.marginalia.nu/search?query=<string> searches in a traditional manner. An interesting concept. It's output is much different to what I was used from answers to natural language queries, however. The interface of Will's https://4get.ca/ is as slim as Google's, but replies to (mandatory) Captchas require JavaScript. In ten days since Google blocked searches, I haven't found an appropriate alternative. Torsten

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