Google Search Brings Continuous Scrolling To Desktop (theverge.com) 57
Google's search results on desktop will load in a continuous scroll instead of dividing into pages, the company has announced. From a report: The move follows a similar change made on mobile in October last year, but isn't quite an "infinite" scroll. Instead, Google will load six pages of results into a single scroll before offering users a "See more" button to show more results. Google says the change is rolling out first for English searches in the US, but judging by the rollout of the feature on mobile it seems safe to expect to see additional markets and languages added over time.
Oh good (Score:5, Funny)
If their shitty search results weren't a good reason to stop using google, this should be the final straw.
Re: (Score:3)
Purely asking from a point of curiosity, why do you find the extra long scroll objectionable? To me it seems like it would make it easier to quickly browse search results beyond the first handful as I don't need to click on a link and wait a moment for things to load to browse all my search results.
Not a massive improvement to usability but it does seem to me to be a small one.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
Why use page-based printed books when we can all roll up our scrolls into neat little tubes. You save so much on binding. Sure it's terrible for reading and jumping around a text, but so much more elegant.
Re: (Score:2)
That's for the nonsense analogy!
Re: Oh good (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I find it easier to remember if something was worthwhile on page 3 for example. Now there is no page 3. Since the scroll is endless am I near the top results or 30 pages deep into garbage link farms.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely seems like a personal preference thing then :)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Add to above points that "endless scrolling" breaks the concept of the link. Since the hyperlink is rather important to the concept of the world-wide web, it breaks that too. So next to being shitty to use, it makes sharing links to results next to impossible, breaks history, and breaks fundamentals of the 'web.
So why do they do it anyway? Well, infinite scrolling is one example of webmonkeys and their endless fads their victory over usability.
It's great for "immersing" you in endless crud to better build
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's very clearly a personal preference thing. You're citing examples that I find ridiculous while spending great effort to minimize what I've described as positives. I can just as easily point out that I don't have a short term memory problem and therefore don't have a problem getting lost on long web pages (as TFS states the "infinite" scroll tops out at what is currently 6 pages of results, if you cant keep track of where you're at on a page that long you really do have a memory problem) meanwhile I
Re: (Score:2)
That's not a preference. It's a valid use case. The use case could lead to a preference.
Re: (Score:2)
You're annoying and your comment made no meaningful contribution to anything.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that this is actually a good point... although it probably could be mitigated if all of the links were visibly and sequentially numbered.
So instead of remembering that something was on page 3, for example, you would remember that it was, say, the 26th link for a given search. This would make quite it trivial to scroll to,,, you would visually be able to tell whether the link you are after is further down from where you are or if you passed it, and by how much.
Re:Oh good (Score:5, Insightful)
Many forums have the page number in the URL which makes it easy to jump to JUST that page.
I DON'T need to see the previous hundred+ responses. A page system lets me focus on just a few replies.
The other problem with this bullshit continuous scrolling is you have no idea where it ends. Are you at the top 1% or the bottom 1% of results?
On a related topic, many forums look like shit -- they have a NARROW middle portion of the page for replies but literally WASTE 50% of the page with extra wide margins.
While continuous scrolling isn't necessarily bad by itself it is usually a red flag that the UX person doesn't know what the fuck they are doing IMHO.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. But that's why sites do it. They don't want you to know anything. They just want you to keep scrolling. They don't want you to reach a logical stopping point (the end of a page) where you can stop using their site and seeing ads. Infinite scrolling keeps people on sites longer.
Re: (Score:3)
"To me it seems like it would make it easier to quickly browse search results beyond the first handful as I don't need to click on a link"
Because sitting there going "scroll, scroll, scroll" is *so* much faster than the arduous process of clicking once.
"and wait a moment for things to load to browse all my search results."
Have you ever used a continuous scroll interface? You still have to wait for stuff to load; just now it interrupts your scrolling instead of being in response to a click.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Because sitting there going "scroll, scroll, scroll" is *so* much faster than the arduous process of clicking once.
No, "because having everything in one place is easier than having everything spread out between multiple places". it's not a huge usability gain but for me at least it seems like a small one.
Have you ever used a continuous scroll interface? You still have to wait for stuff to load; just now it interrupts your scrolling instead of being in response to a click.
Sure, it's nice. I dont have to search for the "next" button, the UI just sees I'm at the end of the page and loads the next results. Plus you still keep all the old results loaded (up to a limit but it's usually a large one) so as to easily be able to go back quickly.
Re: (Score:3)
If you have to search for the 'Next' button, whomever did the UX failed. Also, once you're on the second page, you should know where the 'Next' button is for the third, fourth, nth page.
What is annoying is if you have to scroll bump the bottom of an infinite scroller a few times to get it to page. Or when the scroller pages and it shifts the page on you as you're trying to read.
Re: (Score:2)
"Search" was poor wording. The point I'm trying to make is that hitting next is an extra step I find to be unnecessary
and I am hardly the first person in the world to find extra, unnecessary steps in anything to be annoying.
What is annoying is if you have to scroll bump the bottom of an infinite scroller a few times to get it to page. Or when the scroller pages and it shifts the page on you as you're trying to read.
I don't understand what you're describing here at all. I'm either not getting your description or I dont experience this "bump".
Re: (Score:2)
I love some of the insults and idiotic replies I'm getting from a question I went out of my way to point out was just an honest question. What a way to bring out the trolls, ask a question.
Because sitting there going "scroll, scroll, scroll" is *so* much faster than the arduous process of clicking once.
No, more like because why have an extra, unnecessary step in anything? Clicking next is an extra step when I could just keep scrolling. As I said before, this seems like a minor UI improvement to me.
Have you ever used a continuous scroll interface? You still have to wait for stuff to load; just now it interrupts your scrolling instead of being in response to a click./quote?
I have and sure on an image search one does get very slight delays when scrolling much as I experience when I hit next to load a new page of images. I cant imagine delays being much of problem with the mass of text links a typical internet search returns though.
Re: Oh good (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
For me it gives no indication of how much I have left. Its a psychological technique that facebook and others use to keep you for ever scrolling. I would much see 1 of 10000 pages left.
It probably isn't as bad for google, but it depends how the squeeze us viewing more ads via the technique.
Re: (Score:2)
Also I have heard of people skipping the first few a pages because they are mostly ads, this fixes this "problem" for google.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Interesting)
Purely asking from a point of curiosity, why do you find the extra long scroll objectionable?
I could give you use-cases of infrequent issues with that approach but instead I'll share with you a specific example of how Google has annoyed me with this as recently as today- If you scroll long enough and don't pay attention when you reach a certain threshold, the search actually changes. I searched for reviews of a laptop I purchased recently and noticed when I got past a certain point it said 'see more' and below it it started showing other 'related' searches. In other words I had to keep proving to Google I was committed to my original search by hitting that 'see more' button.
I mean I suppose that might save time searching for porn or something, but it's not scoring too well with me when I'm using it at work looking up certain functions in the scripting language I use. Maybe one day I'll get used to it but for now it's blatantly clear this was done to get more paid-advertisements in front of you by fuzzifying what your actual search is about.
Re: (Score:2)
Well that's not a problem built into providing users with an endless scroll though, that's just some extra shittiness Google has added in.
Re: (Score:1)
Is that why the last couple times I did a search it ended up (mostly) repeating all the same results after a while? It was the equivalent of getting to page 3 but in fact it simply circled back to page 1 again.
Re: (Score:2)
>Purely asking from a point of curiosity, why do you find the extra long scroll objectionable?
Personally, I'm fine with it as long as it isn't implemented in such a way that the page moves around as the off-screen parts of the page load. I find that super annoying on "long" web pages.
Re: (Score:3)
Purely asking from a point of curiosity, why do you find the extra long scroll objectionable?
That increasingly long single page is held in RAM (possibly cached to disk?) rather than being replaced when you hit "Next". (If it's constantly being redrawn via JS as you scroll up/down then it's even worse.) Also, if I've scrolled to the bottom and navigated to the Next page, I obviously didn't find what I wanted on the Previous page and don't need it anymore.
Infinite scrolling may be easier from a navigation standpoint, but it's pointless and dumb informationally.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of reasons, chief among them being browser-bog, which I'm sure Google will find a way to make worse by throwing ads at us every few turns of the mouse-wheel. I'd rather there be pagination and some form of order. I know younger folks are real fond of the "throw everything in a pile and let the computer sort it out" concepts, but some of us still like to exercise our own brains. Remembering results from a few pages back is a TON easier than trying to remember exactly how far into infinity you saw that o
Re: (Score:2)
My biggest issues with infinite scrolls: 1) often when you click on something, then click the back button to return, you lose your place in the scroll. Many infinite scroll implementations reset to the top and lose all the extra pages. Some even refresh the data giving you different results 2) If you get too deep in scrolling, the memory usage is horrible (Reddit is a good example of this).
Google search results are fast to load. It's much more efficient to manually page than deal with the horrible in
Re: (Score:2)
Let me offer you my own take on this: I've been trying DuckDuck Go and Bing as options to Google, but I still (generally) get better result with Google, so it's been hard to switch.
That said, the thing about google is that you have to craft your search with very specific terms, and then on the results you must skip the first five or so "adds disguised as results", and then either you have what you're looking for in the first few "real" search results, or it won't be there at all and you have to modify your
Re: (Score:2)
Purely asking from a point of curiosity, why do you find the extra long scroll objectionable? To me it seems like it would make it easier to quickly browse search results beyond the first handful as I don't need to click on a link and wait a moment for things to load to browse all my search results.
Not a massive improvement to usability but it does seem to me to be a small one.
Because it's a Little Tiny Change From What I'm Used To. This is always evil. Brace for the usual flurry of useless court-clogging suits.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
Please share your genius techniques with us, given that:
* Google pretty much ignores and laughs at your attempts to make it match anything verbatim by enclosing it in double-quotes.
* Google abolished "plus" prefixes (that USED to mean, "DO NOT waste my time showing me results that don't include THIS EXACT TERM") years ago. They used "Google Plus" as an excuse, but it really was because they hated limiting search results just because you asked them to not waste your time.
* Google no longer has any formal concept of prefix-matching or wildcards, and hasn't for years.
* Google's interpretation of parentheses and boolean operators is a sad joke, and has been for years.
For at least the past 15 years, Google has systematically stripped away almost EVERYTHING that USED to make it possible to concisely search for anything. Now, all you can do is try to second-guess their goddamn "natural language" parser, and pretend you don't know that they're deliberately spamming your eyeballs with search results you weren't looking for and don't want, and were in fact deliberately calculated to try and bait you.
So, please, enlighten us. If there's some magic way to tell Google, "DO NOT waste my time showing me any result that doesn't include the literal string "nigritude ultramarine" (just to give one specific infamous search term example), I'm sure everyone here would dearly love to know what it is.
Re: (Score:3)
The trick is understanding Google and not trying to outsmart it. What your complaints are is a clear example of not realising that Google has over the past 20 years morphed into responding to natural language queries. If you're the type to rely on prefixes, +, - NOT, OR etc, then you're going to have a bad time using a system designed to accommodate people who write "Dear Google, how do I do X with Y?" directly into the search bar including correct gramma and complete sentences, which is precisely where thi
Oh hey (Score:4, Funny)
A new way to look over Google's ad collection. How fun!
Re: (Score:2)
all 6 pages of it, and no way to look at next page
Tired of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Aw. (Score:3)
I already miss the Gooooooogle.
it's cancer (Score:5, Insightful)
no really. continuous scrolling is a bad UI design. Whoever keeps pushing continuous scrolling is too tied up with a solution looking for a problem. User studies, if Google bothered to do them, would have revealed just how many problems continuous scrolling introduces. The way this industry works is once one tech giants puts their weight behind a new workflow, everyone else will copy it mindlessly. Good job at making computers worse.
Re: (Score:2)
no really. continuous scrolling is a bad UI design.
Citation needed. Otherwise it just comes across as "I don't like continuous scrolling so I will claim that it's objectively bad". (personally, I liked it on some sites).
User studies, if Google bothered to do them, would have revealed just how many problems continuous scrolling introduces.
If you believe Google, Twitter, Facebook didn't do extensive user studies to validate their continuous scroll then I don't know how to respond. These are behemoths who live by A/B tests. I'm 100% sure that they each found continuous scroll to improve the metrics they goaled on.
Re:it's (greedy) cancer (Score:3)
The studies are for what keeps users engaged and on the sight viewing ads - if you can't find a page 4 because it doesn't exist in this model you wind up hopping around up and down (spending and wasting your time) trying to find it. Make no mistake this is about shoving more ad impressions in your face.
Re: it's (greedy) cancer (Score:2)
Your reasoning seems a bit circular. âoeInfinite scrolling is a bad design because it doesnâ(TM)t use pages.â But that is the entire point of infinite scrolling.
UI fads can eat my shorts (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. They just needed to increase the default number of entries per page, not rid paging. Ctrl+F rarely works on continuous scrolling, for one. It often screws up printing/PDF-making also.
Pile it on to the other dumb UI ideas like "flat" buttons that you can't tell are buttons, micro-text to look "fashionable" (or scare away boomers?), dim and faded text and objects. Wasting space to serve mobile "finger" users when you are using a desktop, field titles in input box place-holders in forms such that your input hides the titles, etc.
There should be a Mt. Assmore for bad UI fads.
Great! (Score:2, Funny)
I noticed this recently (Score:3)
I noticed this recently and I fucking hate it. I also hate that Google wants me to log in every time I search recently too.
Ugh (Score:3)
First the horrible change to the Google News layout, that makes it less optimal and space efficient, now this. I'm considering other options for both, but unfortunately, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, Google's UI decisions are the worst -- except for all the others.
I first invented infinite scroll (Score:2)
Got to get to the "Send feedback" link somehow (Score:2)
Because Google is so very good about reading user feedback, responding to complaints, and fixing stuff that is broken on their website in general.
I like to call it Tantalus scrolling (Score:4, Interesting)
I like to call it Tantalus [wikipedia.org] scrolling.
It's may be 2nd to pop-ups as worst invention in web design; but well in keeping with Google's current trend of lousy UI. I'm looking at you, Youtube and your "hover to play" and shorts. Yeah. Shorts. Let's make video better by shoving everybody's favorite video format at the user: vertical.
Too bad Musk doesn't have the bucks to buy Google and fire all the people that develop this s***. He might have actually done some good.
Much needed (Score:2)
Because the first page is only sponsored.
I would have to be an idiot (Score:1)
to let Google run the required javascript on my browser, anyways.