In early March, I reported that Google may want to kill off AJAX like they did with Flash. Well, that is wrong, their goal is not to kill of AJAX but rather to kill off their special method for developers to help GoogleBot crawl and understand AJAX.

Andrew Shotland asked Google’s Gary Illyes about this on Twitter last night and Gary explained that they are still working on it. In short, Google is testing to make sure their new recommendations work but the goal is not to kill off AJAX web sites, but rather just the _escaped_fragment_ AJAX crawl specification.

Here are some more revealing snippets from Gary Illyes of Google:

The confusion over will Google kill off crawling AJAX? Google say no way!

Gary explains just the special method Google originally had to better crawl AJAX, that will no longer be needed:

Forum discussion at Twitter.