Google dropping continuous scroll in search results

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

UX reactions to continuous / infinite scroll

  • Many commenters welcome the removal, calling infinite/continuous scroll one of the worst UX patterns, especially for search.
  • Common complaints:
    • Breaks browser “back” behavior; returning to results often jumps to the top and forces rescrolling.
    • Makes it hard to resume where you left off after interruptions or accidental navigation.
    • Interferes with page-level actions like Ctrl+F on a large, fixed set of results.
    • Scrollbars become misleading when content is loaded incrementally.
  • Some defend infinite scroll as appropriate for rapidly changing, feed-like contexts (social media) or when users mainly filter/sort rather than navigate pages.
  • A minority actively prefers infinite scroll over pagination and dislikes page-based navigation.

Technical and performance considerations

  • Several question Google’s stated reason (“faster search results”), arguing ranking work is done up front and extra pages mostly reuse that.
  • Others note caching personalized SERPs is hard and that very few users reach page 2+, so recomputing with a higher offset may be cheaper than storing large result sets.
  • Some suspect the most resource-intensive users are those who go deep (bots, scrapers, long-tail queries), potentially making continuous scroll costlier.

Ads, engagement, and incentives

  • Multiple commenters speculate the real driver is ad and engagement optimization:
    • Making page 1 more pivotal, where sponsored links dominate.
    • Encouraging query refinement over deep scrolling, yielding more data and ad opportunities.
    • Aligning with “engagement”-driven design rather than user control.

Result depth and perceived censorship/filtering

  • Users report that for popular queries (e.g., “facebook”), Google now exposes surprisingly few unique results (<100), despite claims of billions found.
  • Some see this as part of a broader trend: heavy filtering, demotion of older/HTTP sites, limited ability to explore long-tail or historical content.
  • Others note the visible result-count metric has been hidden behind a tools menu and was long known (by insiders) to be a rough, inaccurate estimate.

Overall search quality and alternatives

  • Many say Google’s overall search quality has deteriorated, especially compared to earlier years.
  • Several have migrated to or prefer DuckDuckGo, Bing-based engines, Startpage, Ecosia, or niche tools and custom parameters (e.g., “ten blue links” mode).
  • Some interpret the UI tweak as minor relative to deeper ranking/quality issues.