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Google dropping continuous scroll in search results
- nomilk 2y agowhen it was introduced it necessitated an additional step (having to scroll) when wishing to ctrl+f the search results page (I presume most of us have the number of results set too 100, the maximum).
- f_allwein 2y agoIt’s not the same as infinite scroll - apparently, it’s quite recent: „Google launched continuous scroll on desktop search in December 2022 and first in mobile search in October 2021. So continuous scroll only lasted about a year and a half for desktop search.“
- adastra22 2y ago> I presume most of us have the number of results set too 100, the maximum No… why would we?
- ot 2y ago> Google said this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches I'm surprised that this makes enough of an impact: in order to find the top 10 results the engine needs to retrieve and rank a much larger number anyway (I'd guess at least 100 make it to the final stages of the funnel), and that is where virtually all the cost is. That initial set is probably held in some cache so that subsequent page loads don't re-do the search from scratch. So either this is a small win in frontend efficiency, or continuous scrolling is fast enough that a large fraction of users goes past the initial set?
- haizhung 2y agoCaching the retrieved results for future follow-up page 2 queries is nontrivial. It’s also not clear if it’s worth it, the number of requests going to page 2 are in the lower percentages at best, maybe even <1%. So what you typically do instead is to just issue a new query and request 20 instead of 10 results, drop the first 10, and voila, there is your page 2. I do not know if this is how google websearch does it though.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoNot sure they cache, at least not the SERPs. The SERPs vary by user, and even browser. Open a private window in Chrome, FF and Edge. Go to Google. Enter the same search term and it's likely the SERPs will be different.
- londons_explore 2y agoI suspect the problem is that the most expensive to serve users go past the initial set. Yet I believe most of those users are the lowest value users - many of them will be bots and web scrapers, whilst others might be real humans doing long tail queries that have no relevant ads to serve.
- smeej 2y agoI'd pay extra both to serve and to receive incredibly niche ads that would only show up for long tail queries. That was the original promise of all the ad tracking, wasn't it? Outrageously accurate ad targeting? Reach the weirdos in your tribe wherever they are? Now it just feels like drowning in a sea of things a bunch of giant corporations have decided everyone ought to want, and have been programming people to want en masse, rather than helping people find the unique, interesting little things they would actually want were it not for all the programming.
- nottorp 2y ago> most of those users are the lowest value users Yes they are. Because they want results not SEO "content" sites.
- shiroiushi 2y agoFinally, some good news! Now if every other website would drop this horrible "feature".
- eastbound 2y agoAnd drop the infamous 10-row tables with infinite scrolling “because loading 1000 rows is ultra expensive”. Hint: It’s not, but you are using React.
- superhuzza 2y agoI'm surprised it took Google this long to come to this conclusion, there are so many UX downsides to infinite scroll, especially for SERPs. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/infinite-scrolling/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/infinite-scrolling/
- mrkramer 2y agoThey have infinite scroll for the YouTube search results but the irony is that the top search results are often not the ones you are looking for so you have to scroll somewhere to the middle to find useful results (or try different query or filters) and the bottom ones are something like related/similar videos from that topic.
- Zanfa 2y agoYouTube's search is the worst. It's basically "here's 3 videos potentially related to what you're searching for and here's another 50 completely unrelated videos".
- sumedh 2y agoThere has to be reason for that. Youtube obviously has smart engineers so they must be doing it on purpose. It is so frustrating though.
- mrkramer 2y agoYouTube takes thousands of data points and signals to rank search results and there are millions of videos to search and rank, it's quite hard problem to solve. Initially I wasn't a fan of vertical search engine/s but I think vertical video search engine for particular niche/s would be a good idea because YouTube is slacking.
- shermantanktop 2y agoSearch engines are an engineering problem. Tuning ranking and relevance to be “good” on a mass-market content site is an unholy black art. The expectation is that results will accomplish numerous mutually contradictory goals, and be deeply personally relevant to a user who has used the search bar twice ever.
- wordofx 2y agoInfinite scroll is probably the absolute worst ux feature ever conceived. Love to see it get ripped out of everything.
- lostlogin 2y agoIt would be ok if the scroll bar and slow loading could be solved. However I don’t think they can be. Rest in hell.
- vishnugupta 2y agoThis infuriates me to no end. I like a news article, share or save the URL and when it’s opened it is something totally different.
- lelandfe 2y agoI dunno, it’s pretty apt for Instagram, Twitter, etc. It is admittedly awful in many other situations, though.
- dzhiurgis 2y agoOr Google Sheets, which is even more complex. It gets particularly tricky when you got tons of data to be rendered but can't keep DOM in memory - you need to scroll virtually.
- average_r_user 2y agothis happens to me with big sheets it's annoying
- Gualdrapo 2y agoIf by "pretty apt" you meant "really effective into keeping their users scrolling mindlessly and contributing to the 'doomscrolling' effect", yep. Seems to be pretty great for them. The funny thing is that for us who don't use Instagram or Twitter they won't let us scroll past a screen height without asking to be logged in...
- Angostura 2y ago... from now on, organic search results will appear on page 2
- ertian 2y agoYeah, the cynic in me wonders if this is to drive more traffic to page-1 links (which, incidentally, are often mostly 'sponsored' links). Maybe too many people had learned that hitting pgdn a few times yielded better search results.
- londons_explore 2y agoI suspect this is because googles search engine rarely returns more than 40 results for any query these days. Sure, it says "X million results", but if you actually start to scroll, you soon run out. Eg. a search for "facebook" only has 68 results!
- oplaadpunt 2y agoIt doesn't actually say that any more for me on google, I think they removed it at some point when it obviously didn't make sense any more.
- cynicalsecurity 2y agoI don't remember seeing it any more for a very long time. Yeah, it felt like scam.
- nblgbg 2y agothis is interesting ! do u know when they started doing this ?
- b112 2y agoThe sad part is, with them down ranking http only sites, and with all the spam farms, going 10+ "pages" in, eg 100+ links, used to be an easy way to get to real results. Then they added infinite scrolling, and oh well! They should add a "this site hasn't changed in a decade" or "only give http results" for people searching for older stuff. Google takes these weird stances, like making it impossible to find legacy sites (http sites) because they want to push encryption (fine, but don't hurt users!). Or refusing to add zoom + reflow on chrome (super simple to do, just use a virtual dpi), showing how little they care about those with vision issues, or the aged. Why? Repeatedly they've stated it is to "punish" sites not updating for mobile. Well, even mobile sites are hard to see for some. What a ridiculous, absurd, stupid response. The only people they are punishing is the sight impaired, or the aged. Thanks Google.
- Xelbair 2y agoYou seem to be under assumption that they make changes for benefit of the user, but not the adtech. This is extremely weird assumption when talking about google.
- dailykoder 2y agoThat's okay. I'm using duckduckgo anyways. Either it just gives me better results or I got so used to it over the years that I can't make good google-compatible queries anymore.
- cogman10 2y agoNah, Google search has gotten horrifically bad. Pretty much every major competitor is better now, including the oldies like yahoo.
- taneq 2y agoThis is something that I’ve pondered from time to time. I used to have fantastic Google-fu (or alternately, Google used to be fantastic, and it was them that had the fu.) I switched to DDG in 2017 or something, and initially my search results (for whatever reason) weren’t as good. After a few months I found that they were pretty good, and more so, any time I dropped back to Google when I got stuck, the results were hot garbage. I put this down to losing my Google-fu and simultaneously acquiring DDG-fu, but I do wonder…
- rascul 2y agoI find DDG better than Google in general but it's annoying getting local results for unrelated things inserted. For an example, if I search for "protonvpn opensuse", then on page 2 I get results for a local charity, a state political party, and a local cannabis dispensary. Edit to add: I do not get those results when using bing directory.
- BizarroLand 2y agoStartpage and Ecosia are both halfway decent
- rob74 2y ago> Google also told us that it found that loading more results automatically didn’t lead to significantly higher satisfaction with Google Search. I suspect that the low satisfaction with Google Search has less to do with UI/UX issues such as this and more with the quality of search results. But I guess bringing back pagination is easier...
- neaumusic 2y agothe lack of innovation is astounding!
- nblgbg 2y agoBring back the plain old google search without any of the AI! All I want is regular keyword search! I don't get any relevant results these days without adding additional qualifiers like site:reddit.com!
- forbiddenlake 2y agoTry setting up a custom search engine to append udm=14 https://tenbluelinks.org/ https://tenbluelinks.org/
- cubefox 2y agoThis doesn't just hide the AI panels, but also the big knowledge graph panels that appear at the top when e.g. some movie happens to have a name similar to our search query.
- mrkramer 2y agoI actually liked continuous scroll and I thought it is a good change but I guess Google figured out that SEO people got upset because they couldn't brag how: "We can make your website show up on the first page of Google search results."
- mrjin 2y agoHave to say, Google results are now utter cr*p. I was relying on Google for searching. But now, it's useless for me.
- xjay 2y agoRe: Pagination Situation: There are N results shown per page. There are N+1 results remaining. Rigid/simple: The last result is put on a separate page. Flexible/human: If the last results are within some reasonable threshold then include them on the last page. The last page is a different context.
- idle_zealot 2y agoCounterpoint: the flexible approach makes things more surprising and difficult to reason about, both for technical people and laymen. The principle of least surprise is more important than marginal improvements in edge case handling.
- skeledrew 2y agoA rare good move on the surface. But then again continuous scroll doesn't make much sense if the expectation is for the AI result to be prime choice.
- knallfrosch 2y agoAs a EU citizen and Firefox user, I guess they killed it before I ever saw it. Let's see if they ever roll out AI.
- jszymborski 2y agoFascinating, did the EU not have it for regulatory reasons? A/B reasons?
- rchaud 2y agoIt's not running in Canada either.
- xhkkffbf 2y agoDarn. I wanted to brag to my boss that all of my work was "on the front page of Google!"
- rldjbpin 2y agofrom seo/visibility perspective, i feel like there will be a race to be on the first page yet again. i am sure it got switched to "first n" result or something but fun to be back i suppose.