Google dropping continuous scroll in search results

I 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!

Infinite scroll is probably the absolute worst ux feature ever conceived.

Love to see it get ripped out of everything.

> 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?

I'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/

I 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."

Bring 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!

Finally, some good news! Now if every other website would drop this horrible "feature".

when 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).

> 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...

As 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.

Re: 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.

That'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.

A 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.

Have to say, Google results are now utter cr*p. I was relying on Google for searching. But now, it's useless for me.

Darn. I wanted to brag to my boss that all of my work was "on the front page of Google!"

from 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.

... from now on, organic search results will appear on page 2

the lack of innovation is astounding!