Brain Handles

did a test to see if Google indexes Javascript-generated content (for simple scripts).

It doesn’t. So if you are doing a heavily Ajax-based web page, you are (still) risking to prevent Google from indexing your contents.

(Note that for two prime Ajax examples this doesn’t matter: GMail and Google Maps. One doesn’t have any public content anyway, the other no text.)

Please use Ajax only sparingly. It’s a dirty workaround for shortcomings in interaction capabilities of HTML and web browsers, not the ultimate solution to all our web problems.

Two consequences:

  1. For now you can hide content from being indexed by Google by putting it into Javascript code. Note that it will be missing for non-Javascript-enabled browsers then, too.
  2. There might be a business opportunity in running Javascript in a Crawler to obtain additional text to index. This is best when integrated with the Javascript interpreter, to e.g. index text changes as they are generated. And this could also be used to detect e.g. sites with annoying commercials (popups), fraud sites or sites which try to run browser exploits or that try to cheat on search engines by e.g. doing a Javascript redirection.