On the one hand, it’s a sign of technical prowess to be able to accommodate browsers going that far back.

On the other, it’s kind of embarrassing not to have a barebones version of your website load in case an old browser is detected. IE5 had Ajax after all, what more does a search box really need? The answer? Endless tracking and cookies and phoning home. God forbid someone uses a browser we can’t use to collect infinite metrics.

Makes me wonder, does bing work with lynx?

Lynx is not outdated. It’s actively maintained and updated. Last release is a couple months old.

Lynx doesn't support JavaScript like every other modern browser.

It is outdated.

In tech, we call this "opinionated".

I realize that it probably doesn’t pay, but it wouldn’t be that difficult to implement just a form to type queries and a basic html result page that works without javascript.

Welcome to my Friday nightmare. Some update broke dropdowns on IE9 because, apparently plain form select HTML is no longer a viable thing because we can't beautify it. Why my erp to UPS connector needed beautification I don't know. I call, they know, everybody using IE (as required by this connector) is down. Great. Patch rolls in the morning and suddenly looks like chrome is supported.

Sigh

It certainly wouldn’t. Forms have been with us for a very long time and I’ve done it more times than I can remember.