The point is to surface human websites and discriminate against content mills, click funnels and e-commerce.
For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. I also do a personalized pagerank biased toward the blogosphere. The likelihood your website shows up in the results is directly determined by whether real humans link to the website.
It's not a Google replacement by any measure, it's meant as a complement, but if you are looking for more in-depth content on a topic than you can find elsewhere, it's often a good starting point.
I like the idea of a search engine that acts as a sort of filter for known dark patterns along with returning useful results. Limiting on javascript quantity seems like a sledgehammer approach, but I like the spirit of it all the same.
> For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more.
What about sites built with React, etc? Like would you be filtering out cool things like Ableton's "Learning Synths"[1] or do you mostly mean third party scripts?
I don't know why it matters, but enforcing a JS budget turns out to rather effectively reduce the amount of problem websites down to nearly none.
Do babies go out with the bathwater? Almost certainly. But when you're running a small scale search engine, you're never going to index everything anyway, so that's entirely fine.
Why should I download 50M of Javascript implementing a buggy, bespoke browsing engine to render perhaps 1k of text when I'm using a browser that is already capable of rendering 1k of text? For example, I used to enjoy browsing the C2 wiki, but recently they decided they needed to experiment with their own Javascript based browser, thus rendering their site unreadable unless you are using the very latest web browser (that needs to be updated every 20 minutes mind you).
For one I have a sort of budget for how much javascript I will tolerate. Some is fine, like your standard wordpress config probably will fly, but not much more. I also do a personalized pagerank biased toward the blogosphere. The likelihood your website shows up in the results is directly determined by whether real humans link to the website.
It's not a Google replacement by any measure, it's meant as a complement, but if you are looking for more in-depth content on a topic than you can find elsewhere, it's often a good starting point.