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

4 points by lynx97 9mo ago ↗ HN

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?

3 comments

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JohnFen 9mo 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.

boars_tiffs 9mo 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 9mo 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