Can search engines index JavaScript generated web pages?

Question

Can search engines such as Google index JavaScript generated web pages? When you right click and select view source in a page that is generated by JavaScript (e.g using GWT)

Answer 1

if a search engine also cannot see the generated HTML then there is not much to index

That about sums it up. Technically nothing is stopping a search engine from implementing a javascript engine for their bot/spider, but it's just not normally done. They could, but they won't.

On the other hand, you can sniff a search engine's user agent and serve it something readable. But search engines don't usually like this and will penalize you pretty severely if they detect differences with what you send to a normal browser.

Answer 2

Take a look to the Single Page Interface Manifesto of how a SPI (AJAX intensive) application can get indexed by Google and other crawlers. How hard is depends on the web framework used.