Google’s New Shiny Ajax Searching

Teaching AJAX to our co-op student at GenieKnows.com (where I currently work) I decided to show him how it works on Google's search. In the process of describing anchor text, back button, transporting content, … I had a look at what Google returns to display search results, to my surprise it was all obfuscated!

Google had solved an issue which was puzzling me as a computer scientist for quite a while, doing ajax without opening up your API to everyone in the world, which is a problem that has puzzled me in different ways for a very long time (e.g. game score keeping on a server, …). Well they didn't actually solve it, since the JavaScript has someway of decrypting the mambojumbo the server sends back, but for sure it is a good means of protection. Add a symmetric key switching algorithm, where the user gets a unique key per request, or per frame of time to decrypt server messages and you made it a little harder for people to use your public api calls.

Quite Cool! Thank you Google.

Teaching AJAX to our co-op student at GenieKnows.com (where I currently work) I decided to show him how it works on Google’s search. In the process of describing anchor text, back button, transporting content, … I had a look at what Google retur…