Comment by superkuh

4 days ago

I have tried spoofing the user agent. No effect. It seems to be if the browser is new enough then if JS is turned off it blocks you. But if you use a really old browser (~2015 Firefox) that doesn't support modern stuff it still allows non-JS search. I think they must have the server looking at HTTP header or fingerprinting or something. I don't think they could do the redirect based on CSS or HTML5 support without JS being run.

7 comments

superkuh

nicoburns 4 days ago

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.

ronjouch 3 days ago

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>...

superkuh 3 days ago

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>

superkuh 3 days ago

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);

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