Has Google Broken JavaScript Spam Munging?

Baxil writes "For years now, Javascript munging has been a useful tool to share email addresses on the Web without exposing them to spammers. However, Google is now apparently evaluating Javascript when assembling summary text for web pages' listings, and publishing the un-munged email addresses to the world; and spammers have started to take advantage of this kind service." Anyone else seen this affecting their carefully protected email addresses?

Comments

*rolleyes*

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, queue the obfuscation != security thing. If your email address is carefully protected, it is not displayed on a web page, obfuscated or not.

"Google indexes correctly rendered page"

[RichardDeVries]

That should be the title. That is, if it were newsworthy. Which it isn't.

It's not google, it's the web developers

[Punto]

nowadays, half of the pages I try to visit don't render at all without javascript. Somtimes the main content is missing (you just get the headline, the links that go on the sides, and the ads), somtimes it's just a blank page. It seems like all these traditional news organizations just _have_ to be "web 2.0" to appear relevant again.

Google needs to index the page, they don't have much choice.

Some robots are more equal than others

[Cajun Hell]

For example, make a "Phone Number" field and set the CSS display attribute to none. Normal users won't see this field and won't fill it out. Spam-bots will see it and attempt to fill it out.

This only works for as long as spammers don't care about it. I think anyone who can figure out the HTML resulting from javascript, can also figure out the style of an element.

What's really funny about this problem is that we used to talk about using captchas to tell the robots apart from the meatbags, so that you could discriminate against robots. But now people want the robots to make sense of their page (so that they get referrals from Google) but they don't want the robots to make sense of their page (so that their email box doesn't get referrals from spambot). You're on the web or you're not. Choose.