I came across this earlier:
The news is written specifically about the Dreamcast, but what about older operating systems and devices? I tried in Windows 98/IE5:
I find this rather distressing as until now, Google used to always work, no matter what you used.
guess the servers is breathing smoke from excess support or something
This actually started a few months ago. Beforehand, i was still able to check the weather etc on Google using my Samsung SGH-E900’s Netfront-based web browser. I honestly think it sucks.
this sucks so bad… are there any other alternatives we could use instead??
This has been like this for months, includes iOS 8 and below and possibly more, IE11 (!).
This is almost certainly because of AI scrapers scraping google for the huge index. Since it’s a lot easier to scrape older browser’s HTML, they’ve mostly been using that, therefore causing more problems than was worth for google supporting old browsers.
The AI scrapping explanation makes a lot of sense. Although it would be preferable if they could invest in protections for that instead of taking it completely offline.
I tested some major search engines on Win98/IE5, only two worked.
Bing (the home page appears blank though):
and Baidu works too (albeit slowly). However, I couldn’t get any instant answers or the weather to show up, only basic web results. Somewhat more newer browsers will likely fair better.
I also think it’s sad that Wikipedia doesn’t have an HTTP option anymore.
I don’t know how they could even implement protections that would work on ie5, while doing anything to stop scrapers. Also I’ve seen duckduckgo work alright on some devices, unsure about ie5 tho
I can make a revival 
Makes sense—dropping old browser support helps Google improve security, performance, and modern web features, even though a few legacy users may feel the impact.
AI doesn’t actually relate to this,The basic mode doesn’t even include AI,what Google (Alphabet Inc.) is doing the whole time is blocking other browsers that Google thinks isn’t supported anymore and recommends to upgrade to a recent version if you dare to search in their web engine…
Still sad,Google worked so well on old browsers,but they’re dropping support for many older browsers,even if they have TLS support,i wonder what’s next? SeaMonkey being dropped? Retrozilla? Its useragent isn’t unsupported yet…but somehow fails while i search…
My argument isn’t about them being unable to add AI to basic browsing, it’s about other AI companies scraping google. It’s a lot easier to scrape the older versions of the page, which can’t get captchas, and can’t have hella obuscated JS.
Preloading summed this up pretty well already, but: the point of disabling the “basic mode” was to prevent scrapers ran by AI companies from gathering Google data en masse. Just as it takes a toll on smaller websites, I’m sure Google is seeing both broad and targeted scraping at a scale we couldn’t even imagine.
Scraping the “modern” Google page is not cheap, especially not at the scale an AI company is doing it - it requires things like residential proxies, CAPTCHA solvers, etc. that get slow and expensive very quickly at scale. Which is why they might choose to use a version for old browsers - alongside having more simplistic HTML (i.e. easier to parse), it probably won’t have the same protections as the modern Google. It’s a “risk vs. reward” - they might be unable to service a small portion of users (to a company like Google, probably statistically insignificant), but in exchange they are able to fend off the swarms of AI-motivated bot traffic.
(A side note: I think many people in the retro community kinda forget how small we are. We’re around a lot of people like us, so it kinda creates the illusion there are a lot more of us - but I think most computer users are in the mindset of “I don’t care as long as it runs my Facebook.”)
I see…but AI scraping Google’s basic browsing mode is apparently easier so Google must prevent it by doing the “your browser is unsupported” protection?
I see…but i’m more surprised that to prevent AI scraping,they decided to drop older browsers?
I mean, I thought I explained it pretty well:
There’s not really a good way to tell an old browser apart from an AI bot that’s identifying itself as an old browser - therefore, in the pursuit of blocking one, they’re forced to block the other.
Yep,i get it,Niche or old browsers is served the basic browsing version where the advanced features are disabled and you can only search,but somehow AI scrapers tries to spoof their useragent into making Google think you’re using a old browser,and they can easily scrap it? Apparently Google is worried about it so they had to block older browsers from accessing it,hoping AI scrapers won’t scrape Google,right? I hope this is temporary…
