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 infinite scroll 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?
Wall Street demands growth of top line or greater profitability. This is Google’s way of meeting shareholder demands. Yes short sighted. And yes opens the door for chatGPT
It's not just investors, Google is the quintessential example of a company that has taken metric based decision making too far. Everyone in the organisation has metrics to meet, and those KPIs affect promotions and pay. If your KPIs are entirely driven by revenue/profit it distorts the decision making of everyone and focuses on what large impact an individual or team can make to their bottom line, no mater what the collateral is.
This is I think a good example of that in action.
Another is the Google Domains shutdown. Domain names are a low margin commodity market, with a lot of competition. Someone somewhere in Google decided that for their own personal metrics selling the product was good for them. Removing a fairly thinly profitable team, and at the same time a windfall generated by them personally. It clearly should have been treated as an important value add for UX.
I do believe the penny is dropping and advertisers are beginning to see just how little Google cares about how well they are doing. As long as you continue to spend more, Google are happy, even if I'm you are making less yourself. Your advertising rep isn't their to help you improve your ads and make them more cost effective, they are there to extract more of your margin from you.
"Everyone in the organisation has metrics to meet, and those KPIs affect promotions and pay. If your KPIs are entirely driven by revenue/profit it ..."
That is how a publicly traded corporation works, whether you or I like it or not. When you get a listing on stock exchanges you are asking for investment from Tom, Dick and Harry. In return you sell your soul errr provide a return on that investment, in return for more investment.
I remember when I dumped Altavista from my browser and started using the cool new Google "Do no evil". I still have a pretty early gmail address, when it was invite only and 1GB looked like close to infinity or at least pretty bloody huge. I don't put anything useful into a Google thingie because I value my stuff. I'll be changing my search engine quite soon too.
It is all rather soulless and that is what saddens me. The whole raison d'etre for Google in the early days was to do good stuff, innovative engineering and so on. Then the profit motive or bust took over. It doesn't _have_ to but it did. Sadly the two cool kids with wonderful ideas were infected with the lust for world dominance or avarice or both.
I don't know what Google would look like if it had stayed private and stuck to what appear to be its initial values. I do suspect that Brin and his mate would still have been rich beyond my wildest dreams, along with a lot of other people. MS would have probably bought them or tried to.
"You Get What You Measure" means you have to be smart about what metrics you pick.
Instead, we've got a lot of really stupid, but "easy to track" metrics. Today's top-line is easy to track, how much you've burnt through customer goodwill for tomorrow isn't.
You also see a lot of metrics engineered to be gamed. NPS probably meant something in some early original use case, but it's turned into the universal consensus that we're not allowed to actually say "I only got 4.5 star service" out of fear the $10-per-hour schlub giving us that service will be punished for things outside his control.
I wonder-- we know what theoretical research for things in CS and IT look like, but are the "academic" sides of business schools trying to come up with better metrics?
I think that c-suite-shareholders and manager-shareholders generally make these decisions to pump their own investments in the company, and not directly for Tom, Dick, and Harry-shareholders. TD&H benefit, and will complain and drive the share price down if returns are not satisfactory, but the only effect of share prices being driven down is that c-suite-shareholders and manager-shareholders cannot cash out with as big of a sack of money.
So, I don't think that is how publicly traded companies HAVE to work, but yes that is how they do work. Managers do the best to pump the stock for their own personal gain, and who gives a damn if it fails long term because they want to be gone before then anyway.
Anyway, just my cynical view. I have no empirical evidence.
I'm a Brit, so we have a reasonably good Public Service Broadcaster - BBC. We do pay for it, via the TV License fee, which is basically a tax but at least we have a PSB that is tied to the values of the country (the mandate is defined by the govt) and at point of delivery is "free" (cf NHS). Yes, there are a lot of caveats that I won't dwell on here.
If you watch BBC channels or iPlayer (streaming) then you will not see any adverts, at all. A film will run from the start to the end and then you will be told what is on next plus a few "ads" on what other content is available or you have to dig out the clicker from under the dog to find something else to watch on iPlayer. The BBC currently runs four main TV channels plus radio and a lot of streaming stuff and more.
We also have ITV (Independent TeleVision), C4 (Channel 4) and C5. These are all from the analogue days and they have transitioned to digital to be joined by quite a collection.
Oh, sorry - ads ... ITV, C4, C5 and others can show ads. Because they compete with the BBC which has no ads, ad breaks are rather short.
I remember when I first saw Sky (sat. broadcaster, now all media options). They owned the lot and could do what they liked, or so they thought, and were probably right. Ad breaks were horrendously long and more frequent (probably approaching US normal)
I think I'll pass on the Sky type options and get a grip! When you find yourself whining on a SM platform about something like this, I probably ought to get out more.
Nowadays while watching videos in YouTube, I get more occurrences of ads, even in short videos, compared to just a few days back. Very irritating. Started looking out for other options than YouTube.
I find it infinitely amusing the number of people, in HN for God's sake, that DO NOT use uBlock origin on every device they own. Every time I read that "40% of people use adblockers", I think about the average HN user and say to myself: "No way that stat is real".
Smartvs are a joke. Once again: it amazes me that I'm an exception among this crowd, in having a laptop connected to my living room TV HDMI port 100% of the time. It's my workstation, and it's my entertainment center. Wireless mouse + wireless keyboard, the ultimate input medium. Whyyyyy don't ALL tech savy people do this is beyond my comprehension.
i have my desktop pc connected to a tv hdmi port (and playstation and a raspberry pi) and i can plug my laptop in with vga too but i have it networked to my pc anyway and don't bother much. i used to use a wireless keyboard but it made me too lazy to sit at the desk and work.
The solution, is unfortunately, to get a smart stick, such as the Android TV Chromecast or Nvidia Shield, to have Android and sideload all the apps you want.
Youtube without uBlock origin is a traumatizing experience, and it's gotten worse in the last month or so. It went from bearable to let's plug the laptop to the TV unbearable. A couple of weeks ago, I had 3 blocks of ads in 10 minute-videos for the first time. Now, I have 3 blocks of ad (before/middle/after) in 5 minute videos.
Yeah, I was staying at an Airbnb last week and they had a TV with YouTube. Absolutely horrendous, I couldn't get through a short video without it being cut in the middle. Was quite a shock after getting so used to Ublock.
What boggles my mind is that for many many people this is their lived experience. They experience an internet inundated by ads. It's in equal parts incredible, sad and depressing.
Shakes fist at sky.
Saying that as someone who has always used ad blockers but is also paying for the youtube premium family plan.
Seeing normal people navigating the Internet is always a sobering experience. The way they use it is so far from my own that I learned to stop relying on my instincts when arguing about a website feature.
They got me to pay for premium just to avoid ads. But I’m really struggling to justify paying for it, and its more likely that I’ll abandon the platform altogether.
I've actually started to get short ads (3-4s) on YT starting about 3-4 months ago even though I've been paying YT premium for years at $18/month. I realized it's only when I cast it to my TV, so maybe that's how they can get away with it. It doesn't happen every time but was still pretty pissed about it.
It might be the casting depending on the device. I believe casting just refers a url to the device. Since you're not logged in there it will not know you have premium. TV apps where you can log in should work fine.
I don't think that's it because when I tried casting YT from an account that doesn't have Premium, I get way more ads, i.e. 10-20x as many, and much longer ads, just like in the app, so maybe 100x the total ad time. When I cast with YT Premium they're literally 2-3 second ads, and they occur very rarely, so it looks to me that these ads are specifically "calibrated" for YT Premium subscribers, maybe on the order of 1% (or less) of the total ad time of a basic account. And they only occur if I've watched a lot of YT, maybe over 3-4 hours in a day. I don't understand why Google thought it would still be worth pissing off Premium accounts for this little ad time.
Last night was the first time I can remember where I intentionally avoided YT. I just couldn’t stand trying to find what I wanted amongst all the click bait and advertisements.
The good news is I found what I wanted and didn’t have to deal with a barrage of bullshit and click bait videos.
Yea I used it later on and found some user info but I’m finding that I hesitate to bother with it now.
I'd considered it, but so many videos are just filler to drive ad impressions that I can't justify it because the content quality is still lacking for what I want.
I signed up for the Premium trial. The day before the trial expired, I cancelled and deleted my card info. This was weeks ago, and I still haven't seen a single ad ever since. There are ads in the home feed, but none in the video streams themselves. I'm not using an ad blocker.
Advertisers been paying for overpriced Google real estate for decades. Just look at all those brands advertising on their own brand names to ensure they are at the top. Quite the Google tax.
They won't. They'll find some bullshit "security" justification to force 2FA with 30 minute oauth tokens or something else that will make using IMAP too annoying for most, and which'll be difficult to automate.
That's exactly what they did with imap. I had scripts checking my gmail accounts using imap with password-based authentication, and for a while they allowed that as long as you expressly accepted that it was less secure, but not it's gone completely.
It’s all very simple, the people who make the biggest decisions have the biggest percentage of their income derived from stock grants. Ergo they do whatever will make the stock price go up.
Functionality, ethics/legality, and user needs are only important if they are part of the stock price calculus in the short term.
I'm almost positive they are putting ads at the start of (and maybe in the middle of) podcasts in their Google Podcast player as well. I only noticed because the initial ad in a podcast was for a regional store that would not have been included in a national podcast ad read by the host.
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.
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.
In fact I would go further and say that this stuff is more fundamental. Online recipes make cooking look mysterious and complicated when they're actually "cook each ingredient in the obvious way, measure with your heart, combine the things that go together, and assemble the final dish." It's not "easy just re-derive the formula when you need it" like you see in maths, it's that most dishes you don't need a recipe at all.
Baking is the only thing that requires some science know-how but it has its own building blocks [1] that demystify overly complicated recipes.
2. don't tell people their perception of things is wrong, instead consider why they're perceiving things that way, and if you can, do something* that may change their perception
I used to think like that but then I expanded my skills during the pandemic. I now have a much better grasp of ingredients and spices and how they all interact with each other.
All it took was asking “why” a specific ingredient was used at a specific stage in the recipe. You get a lot of answers from that.
For me personally as a home cook I do best when I learn some of the concepts and then I can use whatever I have instead of trying to get a bunch of specific ingredients.
For example one of my staples is braised chicken and vegetables. I know I can use any of certain vegetables I might have (mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, potatoes or sweet potatoes, shallots, etc), any of a couple liquids (water, chicken or vegetable stock, red or white wine, beer, etc) and spice it up with (heavy cream, fresh or dried herbs, mustard, garlic, pepper, bacon, butter, lemon, etc). And I know roughly how I want to cook it: flour the chicken and cook until brown and crispy in a pan, take it out and brown any firmer vegetables, add some spices, add the rest of the vegetables and my cooking liquid and bring to a small boil, put everything in a big oven dish, pop the chicken on top, bake at around 400 for 30-50 minutes until the chicken seems done, add any last things that might burn like cream in the final 5 minutes and then plate up and eat.
Now I don't have to go to the store and look for anything, don't have to worry too much about measuring ingredients, don't have to worry about cook time or technique. I can whip up a big family dinner pretty quickly with whatever I have on hand and experiment a bit with different flavors with confidence that it will turn out good.
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
It’s not even just obnoxious. It’s also just terrible advice even master chefs need to be exposed to a recipe to to know which ingredients to combine… to expect a home-cook to just come up with recipes at Homefr f is ridiculous. They’re just gonna end up cooking the same three or four things that they’ve been exposed to.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat opened my eyes; it showed me an insightful way to deconstruct flavor and therefore the building blocks to construct it. Highly recommended!
If anyone has tips for how they personally deal with this, I’d be grateful!
The drop-off in results has been extremely pronounced for me, both for text and image search. Queries that should easily generate dozens of pages instead result in 1-3. The results are rarely what I’m looking for. It’s slowly been driving me crazy.
At this point, l’ve switched to mostly using individual site’s search functionality (GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc or using site: ) and bookmarking/taking notes on anything more obscure. I’m at a point where I’m tempted to scrape and index my bookmarks so I can search locally. Link discovery is a different matter of course.
Try looking up medical queries, especially for anything more complex than a regular flu.
The first page is just the same few domains. Meanwhile, websites dedicated to the disease and often maintained by supportive communities languish at the bottom of the pile.
Why? Because Google decided that “authority” of domains is important, not the content. So a generic article on WebMD will rank higher than a forum page filled with mountains of information from actual patients and medical professionals.
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.
>I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it—and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard.
Trusting Google is just as apt to get you in trouble.
Google didn't write the recipe, though; the blogger/author did. I have never trusted the snippets that Google started taking out of context and attempts to spoon-feed you at the top of the search, because much of the time they don't answer what I asked. Even then, the source is cited, allowing you to see the context yourself. Google is a tool for locating information from other sources. LLMs do not always correctly cite their sources, let alone provide them.
For me at least, I sometimes find it very difficult to google information I don’t yet know a lot about. It is very difficult if you don’t know the jargon to find anything that goes beyond the very surface level. Or if you did find the correct word, it goes too fast and you are not able to follow. It can be difficult to find an article in the “goldilocks zone” where I can follow along but also learn a lot. I do not do this, but I can imagine that AI could help with that as a starting of point. Then I would probably still google to confirm.
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.
Technically you can use history.replaceState to store, ahem, state on the "current page", so nothing stops you from saving a cursor there to use when loading the content.
The issue with infinite scroll is that very few people know how or care to "make it work correctly"
They do if you use non-ajax navigation: the scroll position is preserved and so is the document as last seen:https://web.dev/bfcache/
But once you call history.pushState, the browser is relinquishing control to you. At that point, going “back” only changes the URL, as far as the browser is concerned, and that part is instantaneous.
> 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.)
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.
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.
there really are. For Google the results past the top ten have been unusable for a very long time, frequently just a repetition of the same garbage.
Circa 2004 I was interested in the question of why Google was so much better than other search engines, which got me into reading TREC proceedings which made it clear that Google probably wouldn't do very well on TREC because the original TREC scores assumes you care about the relevance of the 1000th result and Google was all about "I'm feeling lucky".
A month or so ago I was talking to someone developing a search engine who was concerned that most tracks in TREC now are concerned about precision @ 1, precision @ 5 and things like that and was wondering how to tune up a search engine if the 1000th result matters.
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
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
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.
well infinite scroll allows you to monetize bad results. Bad results incentivize more scrolling allowing you more ad impression opportunity.
It’s completely rational for them, their business model is no longer aligned with giving you the top result and people from past conditioning won’t go page 2 because they know nothing of value is there.
So if you want more ad revenue shitty results and infinite scroll are a match made in heaven
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
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.
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.
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.
For Google maps if you have an iphone then i recommend Apple Maps. The traffic data isnt great and their map data could use work and no offline maps (yet!), but i find their directions easy to follow and the UX miles ahead. Lane changes are clearly communicated ahead of time, and the directions are something I’d tell another human, i.e fewer turns than the “optimal” path.
I found the OsmAnd+ user experience quite irritating, and OpenStreetMap is just a fancy database and not a competing product to Google Maps for the user who wants live directions/navigation.
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).
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.
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.
One example can be resources and efficiency. One time I was trying to browse Google Fonts to find something in a certain visual style (ie not something you can really search for via keywords). It made Chrome completely unresponsive after a little while. This was a few years back so maybe it’s better now, but I’ve seen similar slowdown on other sites.
A more human reason is that personally, I like to portion out and chunk off parts as no longer requiring my attention. I read a page and move on, clear the mental cache and start again. Infinite scrolls can mess with my focus.
For keyboard users it acts as a focus trap, breaking the expected interaction model of the page. You can’t ever reach the footer, at least until the results stop.
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.
If you are using the exact same search terms you have used dozens of times, then you likely know what the first few pages of results are, and may want to skip to where you previously left off in your search.
> 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.
Weirdly, the "downgraded" Google search experience I get in Firefox is more functional than the "full" one I can get through Chrome or the Google search bar on my phone. An infobox or two followed by a paginated list of relevant links, compared with all the noisy bells and whistles and sometimes multiple screen-fulls of sponsored content they throw into their modern SRPs.
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
It's weird being an old-school desktop computer user who never jumped on the mobile bandwagon. Not just because it makes me somewhat a dinosaur, but also because anecdotes about the average users internet experience these days sound like tales from some slightly-dystopic parallel universe.
Side note: It's so weird for me to hear the term "google search". It's what happens when you haven't used a site directly in years. I almost have to ask myself (facetiously), is Google Search still a thing?
The same thing has happened with Microsoft. I used to be a Windows/GUI user (never in love with the company going back to DOS, I was a PC-DOS user (IBM)) until I switched over to Linux many years ago. Microsoft basically ceased to exist (except for github).
I hear Microsoft in the news and it's almost like they exist in a parallel universe.
Apple - never has existed (for me). Facebook/Twitter - accts but never use. Spotify - nope. Etc, etc...
The only reason I bring this up is because, despite this, I still remain well-connected. I have lost nothing from the Web. I strongly feel that the hold these big tech companies have on many of us is tenuous at best. Google best not forget this.
Reddit certainly has forgotten and with but a metaphorical wave of my hand, reddit now too ceases to exist (for me) - and I've lost little. Big Tech... replaceable (hmm... mostly).
PS: Still rely/use Google (gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android), so there's one big tech firm I still depend on. YouTube, Maps and Android being the really hard ones to replace.
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?
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
I don’t have it yet, but as a Search User I think I’d be OK with it?
Then as a business or blog that wants to get indexed, I feel like the friction no longer being a >= page 2 result is going to surface more content and get more clicks.
I guess it will allow for more ads with potentially better click through on ads as well.
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.
Hey, I have the same problem. I do not want to discuss about ads or which way is better. I just want the old google search back.
Did someone actually answer the original question?
I'm afraid to jinx it, but I live in Russia, and it seems that this function has not yet been introduced here. I'm not sure if this will help, but before getting the VPN you can try going to Search Settings and changing your region to Russia.
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.
I stopped using Google for most searches for a long while now. I suggest you do the same. It's not like they're going to make user centric changes now, just wallet centric ones.
I really think that they may now sprinkle good results between worse ones just to show more ads, and force you to scroll, and scroll, and read more ads. Why to provide good results immediately if it is not a good business decision? They need to balance good and bad results to not anger consumers too much and to get target revenue
For anyone frustrated with Google searches poor result set - especially for very obscure search terms where it often returns "0 results" even though you know that what you're looking for is on the internet...
Try Baidu. Its search index is much bigger, and even if you don't speak chinese it is very usable. I frequently find what I'm looking for there when Google fails me.
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?