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The search engine will return to the traditional pagination of results
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According to the company, this will allow for greater efficiency by not loading results that the user had not requested.
Applications like Instagram, Twitter or TikTok have made us addicted to ‘doomscrolling’. Constantly sliding the screen down became so popular that even Google ended up resorting to infinite scrolling in its search engine. However, that change will now be canceled.
Temporary experiment. As noted in Search Engine Land (SEL), Google launched this continuous and infinite scroll in its search engine in December 2022, but it had implemented the feature more than a year earlier in the search engine on mobile devices. At that time Google indicated that “with this update, users can seamlessly navigate through the different results before having to press the “See more” button.”
Unknown impact. That decision could theoretically influence users by making them scroll beyond the traditional first page of results in search of what appeared to be the most suitable. That could also influence click-through or advertising positions, but Google seems to have determined that the feature was not that interesting.
Goodbye to infinite scroll. Be that as it may, Google has decided to disable this option. The continuous or infinite scroll begins to be deactivated starting today in the desktop version of the search engine (on our computers) and will supposedly begin to do the same with the mobile search engine “in the coming months” according to statements from a Google spokesperson to SEL. .
Faster results. According to Google, this change will allow the company to serve search results faster. They will also save on loading and displaying additional results that users had not requested.
I didn’t like it very much. In fact, the infinite scroll seems not to have convinced users. According to Google’s comments on Search Engine Land, “automatically loading more results did not lead to significantly higher satisfaction on Google’s search engine.”
Pagination is back. If you still had the search engine with continuous scroll activated, you will soon stop seeing it, and instead a pagination bar will be displayed that will allow us to access a numbered list of results pages, as was the case until the arrival of infinite scroll.
Image | Arkan Perdana
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