Even though JavaScript was created in 1995, it wasn’t until 1998 that Google actually launched their search engine. Even though the two came out within three years of one another, they didn’t join forces right away. It took 15 years for the platforms to form a union and become the giants they are today.
Until recently, Google couldn’t properly utilize one of the most fundamental of all the programming languages on the Internet. Can you imagine how much different the Internet would have been if the two would have joined together decades ago? With JavaScript being close to two decades old, it now powers the majority of the activity on the Web. For quite some time, crawlers on Google weren’t able to render JavaScript at all. (JavaScript is used for displaying images, text and files.) In turn, they were missing a lot of content that was out there.
Many often wonder what the reason was why the two didn’t join together sooner. It seemed only natural that the two should join together and become one to help maximize the power of the two giants. The reasoning was quite simple, when the search engines for Google were created, JavaScript wasn’t as prominent as it is today. At the current time, Flash was powering a significant amount of interaction on the Web. When Flash started to die off slowly, Google held steadfast with HTML. It wasn’t until later that CSS came into the picture. It was crucial to implement JavaScript into Google’s crawler, which is why the change came about.
This isn’t something that came out of the blue for Google. In 2012, Google’s head of Internet spam urged any developers not to hide Java from all of their crawlers because Google was improving their crawling capabilities.