Ask HN: Has Google search switched to infinite scrolling for you too now?

Phil Tadros · June 17, 2023

2023-06-17 09:56:12

They had to make this change because they increased the number of ads. If the result is paginated, a high percentage of links in the first page would be ads. With pagination that’s not a problem because there are an infinite number of links on “the first page”.

Overall, Google has turned up the number of ads. Not just in search, but also in YouTube and also in Gmail. In YouTube, you didn’t have ads in low-view-count videos. Now they have ads in all videos, whether the video owner turned it on or not. In Gmail, in the Promotions tab, only the top couple of items were ads, now there are ads interspersed with the rest of the mails.

Increasing revenue by turning up the volume of ads is very short sighted. Personally, I find Google properties less interesting now, and it is tarnishing the Google brand. So why are they doing this? Perhaps they need to fill a revenue shortfall caused by ChatGPT?

Google pruned their index so radically that it doesn’t make a difference anymore. For a bit less common stuff, but yet nothing esoteric, I get to the last page around page 4 or 5. And most of the stuff on those 5 pages are mostly SEO-farm copies of the same stuff.
I quit looking for recipes on google. Bought a dozen of recipe books last year. fuck that shit.

As an ex chef, escoffier as a basis, then salt fat acid heat by Samin nosrat.

Recipes are a guide for unfamiliar, but once you learn the profiles of each ingredient you can expand greatly.

I know it’s a bit off your comments and I certainly search myself for new basis to play with, but I hope it helps 🙂

It’s the opposite.

There’s nothing wrong at all with “cook by numbers” and it’s especially great if you didn’t learn to cook as a child. It’s like learning at a coding boot camp where you learn to write some simple business logic based on a spec, or learning algebra in grade 8: basically syntactic transforms with no theory.

But Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach you to look in the fridge when you’re hungry but unmotivated and quickly make something from what happens to be there that isn’t boring, faster and cheaper than ordering junk food delivery.

Yes you could turn into a fancy chef but the suggested advice is great for someone like me, who doesn’t really care particularly about food.

Yeah those books are definitely great and the building blocks Nosrat provides are crucial for any home chef that wants to take a scientific approach to decision making in the kitchen. But most of the time, I just want to pick a recipe as a starting point

I’d rather support those small time blogs, people who do it as a hobby and for the creative joy of it, especially for recipes you don’t see a lot in the English-speaking world. Using a language model for a recipe feels soulless to me.

Despite all the hate Google and infinite scroll gets, it seems to be good decision doesn’t it?

You rarely go to even the second page, I’m almost always improving/changing the query instead of going to next pages, so even in those edge cases where I have to go to next pages, then auto loading next results when I’m at the bottom of the page seems viable solution

Infinite scroll is annoying because e.g you cannot link to thing

but that’s not the case with Google – you do not link Google results to people, you send them the result itself – desired website.

My biggest problem with infinite scrolling in general is
it clears scrolling state by browser back or page refresh.

Sometimes there’s no good result in the first page,
or I want to keep searching for more investigation.

When I find a seemingly interesting result after several scrolls
and visit the page but find out it’s not what I want,
I want to go back to the search result and continue.
But after browser back, the result is cleared and
I have to scroll several times again.
Even if I open the result in the different tabs and keep the search result,
it may disappear after browser refresh or restart.

> Infinite scroll is annoying because e.g you cannot link to thing

There are other reasons. It’s annoying to me because on mobile there’s a link I use often that’s only in the footer of the page.

And yep, the link is still there in the infinite scroll version of the results page – if you swipe violently downward several times then after 3-4 refreshes it gives up, and you can click footer links.

(The link in question is “see results in English” – which I use often due to my region and because I use incognito tabs for random google searches.)

That right there is the distraction though, more “efficient” for a corporate but worse for everybody else. Like you get a catch-22 but it’s got its own catch-22. Issue ain’t removing pages like you’d share page links, issue is making search “so efficient” clicking on page 5 or 10 direct is worthless then removing pages because google went and done made it worthless first. It’s a buncha cattywampus and the real sad thing is Google only got better for itself you ask me, so it ain’t really about sharing links to pages it’s about pages having been made worthless

> Infinite scroll is annoying because e.g you cannot link to thing

Infinite scroll is also annoying because it often breaks when navigating back to the page.

Since this is a very popular use case in the context of a search page, I’m not a fan of this change.

In theory yes.

In practice when I go to youtube’s search page (safari mobile), scroll down past infinite scrolling, click a random video and go back, I don’t see the video that I clicked on my screen.

I haven’t seen the google’s search page with infinite scrolling. But even if it works now, I’d be worried that it would break in future, since so many popular websites don’t care about that.

Yup this is definitely an improvement for me.

Having to page through ephemeral search results is just added friction. I’m already scrolling anyways so this is much better UX.

With distinct pages it’s easy to bookmark them and/or remember “oh, there was something interesting on page three.” With infinite scroll, that interesting thing becomes lost in a maze of twisty passages and more difficult to return to because you are never on an individual static page, but rather a single ever-changing page.

In theory there might be more than ten interesting results on a topic, and with some search engines, say the one at

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

there actually are. For Google the outcomes previous the highest ten have been unusable for a really very long time, regularly only a repetition of the identical rubbish.

Circa 2004 I used to be within the query of why Google was so significantly better than different search engines like google, which received me into studying TREC proceedings which made it clear that Google most likely would not do very properly on TREC as a result of the unique TREC scores assumes you care in regards to the relevance of the a thousandth outcome and Google was all about “I am feeling fortunate”.

A month or so in the past I used to be speaking to somebody creating a search engine who was involved that the majority tracks in TREC now are involved about precision @ 1, precision @ 5 and issues like that and was questioning tune up a search engine if the a thousandth outcome issues.

I assume issues go full circle.

If your first language is English, and you end up using Google in a non-Anglophonic country, the option to change language (without going through sign-in hoops) is a drop-down at the bottom. The infinite scrolling, where results get lazy-loaded is really irksome in that case.

I used to often do a minimum of 5 pages when I was doing any sort of serious research to start checking the more esoteric and less SEO optimized results. The infinite scroll has definitely been annoying for me

It’s comical how they finally get around to infinite scroll after destroying the quality and quantity of the results. I very regularly get to the end of the results 20-30 in.

I used to utilize the vaguely related deep-dive results, especially in image searches, to go on tours of nostalgia or just wandering. But Google can’t offer that anymore.

Mine has infinite scroll, but not infinite scroll of results. At a certain point it switches to boxes of recommended articles based on what it considers similar searches, which are literally never useful to me

A couple of weeks ago it stopped showing the search page numbers at the bottom for me, but didn’t infinitely scroll. I went into settings and changed it to infinite scroll manually so I could get past the first page of results. Trying in a different browser profile, I didn’t have the issue. I got used to infinite scrolling in my main profile.. and then it mysteriously went back to multi-page results with working numbered links all by itself.

I haven’t dared go back into settings to see if it’s still set to infinite scroll (I assume not) because I don’t want to break it any more.

I’m used to things randomly breaking in youtube, in the play queue, for example, but I thought this was kind of a shocking level of breakage to find in an online behemoth’s primary offering, especially given how essentially simple its presentation task is.

Seems they might be still fiddling with it, though – searched the term slashdot and found “About 14,000,000 results (0.28 seconds)”, but the bottom of the page only shows links to three pages of results, expanding to seven when I click “next”.

I wonder what they think they’re doing? Probably too much remote working, I expect. That’ll be it.

I’m surprised that I’m asking this because I’ve been such a fan of Google for years….but does anyone have alternative suggestions for Google products? (

Looking for alternative suggestions for:

1. Google Maps (yikes was it bad when I used it this week)
2. Google Docs (such a frustrating lack of features)
3. Google Drive (it’s impossible to find anything when you are sharing docs with someone)
4. Google Search (ChatGPT has spoiled me and I find Google Search to be a large waste of time)
5. Google Classroom (their quizzes/homeworks/forms are unbelievable bad and I can’t tell what students can see vs what they can’t)
6. Gmail (I’ve love gmail for so long but with all the other products just being so bad it’s making me wonder what else I’m missing something better)

Sorry to sh!t on Google so much, but everything is just so mediocre that I’m tired of it and want something higher quality. Anyone have thoughts?

> ChatGPT has spoiled me and I find Google Search to be a large waste of time

I hope you’re not blindly trusting answers. I experimented with ChatGPT for a while and (even when using the GPT-4 model) I would get answers that were false but didn’t sound too unreasonable. I could have easily been misled if I didn’t already know the answers to the things I was asking it.

i use magic earth for maps, libre programs for word/excel etc (not cross-device though), searxng for searches (pick an instance and try it), tutanota for email (they focus on privacy – emails and your inbox are encrypted).

Google maps has deteriorated considerably for me recently. It used to be flawless, but now it routes me through random neighborhoods and awkward narrow streets, like I haven’t seen navigation this bad since MapQuest.

Magic earth,osmand+,
Openstreetmaps

Wps, only office, Zoho docs

Offline only office is really nice

Nextcloud

Searxng

Zoho mail is like Gmail a decade ago, protonmail is decent too

Yes, you can disable it. It’s right there at the top of the Search Settings page.

However, the selection of individual pages is gone, and replaced by a single “More results” arrow at the bottom of the page. So it does appear that they’ve gutted the functionality, and it’s only continuous scrolling whether you choose manual or automatic style.

On mobile it might be. On Desktop it (1) devalues the scrollbar, since you can no longer use its size in proportion to its container to judge how large the page is compared with your view of it, and (2) adds jank while the next set of results is loaded (the pause while loading feels random rather than an expected event in response to your changing page).

The other thing that’s annoying me is the overriding of cursor keys, making each scrolling step much larger than it would normally be. Yes, it might be more logical for a keypress to step to the next result, but that’s not how the cursor keys are expected to behave in the browser, so it’s jarring.

> On mobile it might be. On Desktop it (1) devalues the scrollbar, since you can no longer use its size in proportion to its container to judge how large the page is compared with your view of it, and (2) adds jank while the next set of results is loaded (the pause while loading feels random rather than an expected event in response to your changing page).The other thing that’s annoying me is the overriding of cursor keys, making each scrolling step much larger than it would normally be. Yes, it might be more logical for a keypress to step to the next result, but that’s not how the cursor keys are expected to behave in the browser, so it’s jarring.

I can’t really speak to the benefit for a search engine, but for our app we opted to keep actual pages because it allows users to remember approximately where some content is and go directly to that page.

Heh, a pareto improvement is “a new situation where some agents will gain, and no agents will lose”

I get your meaning but it’s kind of a funny phrase to mean “no downsides to this one agent, me”

There is. After 4-5 pages of loading Google gave up and showed me a “More search results” button with a footer below it, along with the legally required things like a link to the privacy policy. But who knows whether it’ll be 4-5 pages in the future?

This is a common problem with infinite scroll websites, not just Google of course.

> However, the selection of individual pages is gone

Are you logged in? I have disabled infinite scrolling, and I still have selection of individual pages.

But if I open an incognito window and disable infinite scrolling, I get the same “More results” as you, so I’m wondering if it’s related to being logged in or not.

Google’s search results page is a mess now. It is now an endless feed mimicking social apps cluttered by obtrusive images and suggested content that is never really what you want

I’m often using Google search in Incognito/Private/InPrivate windows, so I’m getting to see all the, pardon my french, bullshit they’re AB testing on users constantly. I’ve so far seen three distinct forms of infinite scroll (edit: on Mobile, for clarification). One is just infinite scroll with classic results in a list format as usual. The second type I have encountered is that after about 7 to 10 lines of results in typical list format, it will begin showing you everything in a grid format of squircles, where it’s harder to read the text previews. The third form of infinite scroll I have seen, and in my opinion the worst, is that after fifteen or so results, it begins showing you results for a separate (but allegedly related) query, and forces you to hit a button to continue seeing results for what you actually wanted to see… and get this, the button to see more doesn’t always work. Sometimes it gives an error message. (This one irritated me because I was looking at translations for a song into English, and then the results started showing translations for different songs from the same other language, but not even by the same artist — very helpful, Google!) Currently for me, in mobile Chrome, both Incognito tabs and normal tabs display infinite scroll of the list type, where results appear more or less in “normal” format, albeit more spaced out than they were a few years ago.

It has been infinite scroll for a while for me, which was fine but seems like they did that just to pave way for their second trick: displaying ads interspersed with actual results. IMO the only things distinguishing ads from actual results now is a small “Ad” label. Previously the placement also used to be an indicator, where by muscle memory you’d typically skip first few results.

Few bad quarters and I am sure some PM at Google will write a brief for A/B testing removal of Ad label

Yeah, got that here quite a while ago. Though it also comes and goes. It’s… I don’t know, better and worse at the same time? I notice it, and I feel like after a few page downs I just need a new search, so I need to go back up and start over. I guess it’s a step down?

Multiple businesses I have worked for in the last 20 years A/B tested infinite vs paginated scroll and found that the infinite leads to more stuff being seen, and therefore bought. Google was holding out because of the way they sold ads, but we knew they’d change eventually.

Infinite scrolling needs to die in a fire. I’m sure it increases some fallacious “engagement” metric like time spent on the page or something, but it’s an utterly horrible experience. Scroll down one and a half pages, watch a spinning circle as the next few results load, then watch the spinning circles as the result images load, repeat until you can’t take it anymore and give up.

On the whole this assertion of always-available javascript has basically destroyed the usability of the web as every small minded manager/designer thinks that inserting themselves in the way of the user makes for some endearing “experience”. It doesn’t.

Just noticed it now, I’m on mobile. They really spilled the beans on this one, I guess that’s one way of saying that they give up for good when it comes to helping people to find stuff on the web.

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