5 ms·

The biggest problem I have with infinite scroll is that it breaks searching within a page. If I want to find something I have to scroll down to the bottom and t

• foota 8y ago
  Isn't this better solved with a combination of bookmarking, tagging, good search, and resetting the person to the same spot on a page when it reloads? (facebook doesn't do the latter for instance, and it's massively frustrating to me)
  • calvano915 8y ago
    The bit on Facebook is purposeful. Youtube does the same thing. It's about keeping the user engaged with another novel engagement whether ad or content driven. You may be frustrated and possibly rage quit, but the majority fall for it cyclically and spend more time on the service as a result. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread: "As someone with ADHD, I immediately close any website that uses infinite scroll. I will become insanely focused on that site to the point that I tune out the outside world. What begins as "oh, I'll just look at this one article" turns into at least a half hour of wasted time before I'll be able to break out of it."
  • mrob 8y ago
    None of that will be as fast and simple as pressing Control-f and typing the search term. You don't even need to press enter. Searching within the page is a superbly useful and well-designed interface, and I would be very surprised if any custom web app solution could do better.
    • paulryanrogers 8y ago
      If only they had regular expression support in the built in find. A few times I've put that into web apps and found it quite useful.
      • PhasmaFelis 8y ago
        I bet there's a browser extension for that.
    • foota 8y ago
      The alternative to infinite scrolling isn't everything on one page though, it's paging.
• reagan83 8y ago
  Lazy loading can also break search within page.
  • TheRealPomax 8y ago
    Now you have two problems.
  • mrob 8y ago
    You should include same-sized placeholders for the unloaded content, so the page doesn't jump about when you search and push the search result off-screen.
• notatoad 8y ago
  If the information you're searching for would have been in the next page, searching within the page would have been similarly "broken" in a paginated UI. The alternative to infinite scrolling isn't to load infinite data up front.
  • tfigment 8y ago
    Pagination at least gives a hint as to what is loaded and if i need to repeat search again on next page. This is harder when you don't know what is actually loaded without scrolling.
  • astura 8y ago
    If you are presented with pagination, you have a hint that there's more content to load and how much more, 2 pages or 100 pages? I know immediately that I have to repeat my search and how many times. You aren't "warned" of infinite scrolling upfront, you don't know there's unloaded content unless you scroll down. Nor do you have any idea when it will end. It's mystery meat navigation.
  • batiudrami 8y ago
    But if I found that content via a search engine I would have been directed to the correct page to find what I was looking for.
    • edoceo 8y ago
      I've had many occasions of clicking links from G to land on a page that should have what I want, the cached copy did but the landed page doesn't
      • setr 8y ago
        That would be true of any site that updates its webpages at any time, regardless of static or dynamic webpages, and certainly regardless of pagination/infinite load. The only difference really is that infinite load almost guarantees the page won’t have what you want on it, when you visit it.