Brett_Tabke - 12:08 pm on Jun 26, 2010 (gmt 0)

Rumors of Googles ability to parse javascript go back to when Google first hired away mozilla developers. It was reasoned that if Google could build a browser (done), it could eaisly retrain GoogleBot to parse javascript. The effect would be that Google could interept things such as dynamically built urls and content produced via ajax calls. For the first time, Google has publically admitted that it has the capability.

Yet those looking closely at their server logs may notice that Google is now requesting links that don't appear directly in JavaScript -- links that get put together on the fly and Google could not possible know about unless it could execute at least part of that JavaScript code. Mark Drummond, chief executive of Wowd, a unique search engine company we profiled in the magazine earlier this year, explains in an email why understanding JavaScript is "a very deep, very hard, and very classic computer science problem." He explains that the challenge is in figuring out whether or not the JavaScript code ever stops running. "The halting problem is undecidable," he writes. He says there is no known algorithm that can be applied to any program, at any point, and tell whether or not that program continues ad infinitum. The fact has been mathematically proven. Drummond, whose search company avoids some of these complexities by tapping humans to do its indexing, notes that it would possible to simplify the problem and merely determine, for example, whether or not the Web application has made a data request to Facebook. Presumably, that's what Google is currently doing. [blogs.forbes.com...]