Google dropping continuous scroll in search results

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Google is removing continuous scroll from its search results and reverting to classic pagination, officially citing performance and user satisfaction reasons. Commenters are skeptical that backend costs or UX justify the change, instead pointing to advertising incentives, SEO optics around “page one,” and Google’s increasingly shallow and curated result sets. Many also criticize infinite scroll as poor UX outside of social feeds and note a broader decline in Google’s search quality, prompting some to rely more on alternatives like DuckDuckGo or Bing-based engines.

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.