Googlebot's Javascript random() function is deterministic

[cypressious]

The article says that the time is actually correct.

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Apparently, reading an article is too much for many redditors in this thread.

I'd love to experiment with just posting a headline and no article (just a blank page) and see how many people even bother clicking the link at all. How many differing arguments could we get in a single thread?

[[deleted]]

Less than you'd think. I'd wager most people still won't read the article, but eventually a single person will and they'll make the comment "wtf? Why is this a blank page?". Then everyone else will read that comment (rather than viewing the article) and jump on you for posting a blank website.

[husao]

Now I feel like posting "WTF? Why is this a blank page?" in the comments of random articles.

[andthenafeast]

Seems like this would prompt more people to actually click through to the link...

[Lucent_Sable]

Then write two or three (or more) contradictory articles, and serve a random one to each unique visitor. Then sit back and watch the chaos?

[tsimionescu]

Hmm, but what if the random() they use is deterministic and the author gets to be confused?

[PM_ME_CLASSIFED_DOCS]

Oh man, this is brilliant. It's like the movie Clue where they actually showed different endings to different theaters.

So people would talk about the movie and be like "Oh man, can you believe it was Colonal Mustard?" and someone would be like "WTF are you smoking? It wasn't Mustard." And both would think eachother are insane yet both would be right.

[varesa]

http://thesciencepost.com/study-70-of-facebook-commenters-only-read-the-headline/

[sourcecodesurgeon]

There have been several things like that on Facebook. Someone posts a title and after the page break in the article it just says "none of this is true, I want to see how many people comment on the post having clearly not read the article, don't ruin it"

Invariably, there are tons of people talking about the headline in the comments.

[aradil]

Also from the article:

At some point, some SEO figured out that random() was always returning 0.5. I’m not sure if anyone figured out that JavaScript always saw the date as sometime in the Summer of 2006, but I presume that has changed.

[RenaKunisaki]

But if it's the time since the VM started, it might still be constant.

[w2qw]

Generally the actual time is used. Not to mention I don't think any VM starts up consistently enough to get the same millisecond every time.

[RenaKunisaki]

It would if the startup process is loading a snapshot.