The Google index is still accessible from many other "proxy search engines" that still work without JS, one example is Startpage.

See the nice list from Seirdy for more details on search engines: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...

Yep, https://html.duckduckgo.com works well in such browser though :)

But does it require ES6? Javascript was quite minimal in the early days. It doesn't need a JIT, in fact I'd prefer it not to be.

Google at this point kind of controls the www. Now, strictly speaking that statement is not true, but it now feels as if Google sits in so many areas that are important for the www; chrome is just the most obvious one.