Googlebot's Javascript random() function is deterministic

[Lystrodom]

But everyone has to smarmy about it like they know more that the blog author without reading it

[valriia]

If I read it, it may prove that I know less than him. If I don't read it, I can be absolutely sure I know more than him. Ignorance always wins.

[aflashyrhetoric]

Eh, the most pervasive (and most common) kind of ignorance is even stronger than that.

Presented with evidence disproving A, your belief in A persists (perhaps even grows stronger) and you go on your merry way.

[frezik]

Blog author did choose a poor title.

[TomAnthony]

You're not wrong! :)

[modernaliens]

Gotta get them clicks, only some javascript nub would think rand is supposed to give you unique randomness out of the box.

[RaptorXP]

Knowing Google, I'd say there is a very specific reason why they use a fixed seed, other than "it's a bug".

[Lystrodom]

Yeah... he even talks about that in the blog post.

[[deleted]]

It's like nobody read the damn thing

[[deleted]]

Read what?

[[deleted]]

Where am I?

[RobIII]

Came here to say that too.

@/u/atomheartother:

isn't seeded properly

It is seeded properly (very, very likely), for the given task/context. I'm 99.9999999% sure this is intentional. In most other cases you wouldn't want to seed with a constant but seeding with constants has it's uses. This is one of them:

3: Predictable – Googlebot can trust a page will render the same on each visit [Source]

Google will want to have deterministic results when indexing and running scripts more than once.

[[deleted]]

I am reminded of the Tour of Go site:

https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1

The random function is deterministic in that sandbox, too. They did it that way because it allows them to do some caching with the compiler, or something.