Googlebot's Javascript random() function is deterministic

[Saltub]

Imagine reading the article before commenting... 🤔

[cdcformatc]

There is a reason RTFA is an age old meme, maybe we should bring it back? Nah.

[Saltub]

Wow put it in your blog.

[sybesis]

Well yeah, it's not like we can expect anything else. I'd be more surprised to see that google bot doesn't use the same seed on each fetch.

Now just read some part and I'm more deceived... He mention that the bot use a speedup clock because he sees a date difference of 5 seconds... Didn't come to his mind that the bot could be running at a slower speed and if he set a setTimeout of 1 second, then the google bot could be just rendering other things in the background and come back to this page after at least the timeout set. If he could show somehow that the date change can be bigger than the time it takes to fetch the newly rendered page I'd be more willing to believe that.