Apps like Instagram, Twitter or TikTok have made us addicted to ‘doomscroll’. Constantly scrolling down the screen has become so popular that even Google has started resorting to infinite scrolling in its search engine. However, this change will now be canceled.

temporal experiment. As noted in Search Engine Land (SEL), Google launched this continuous and infinite scrolling on its search engine in December 2022, although it had implemented this feature in its search engine on mobile devices more than a year ago. At the time, Google stated that “with this update, users will be able to seamlessly navigate through different results before hitting the ‘See more’ button.”

unknown effect. This decision could theoretically impact users by forcing them to scroll beyond the traditional first results page to find what seems most relevant. This can also affect click or ad positions, but Google seems to have determined that this feature isn’t that interesting.

Say goodbye to endless scrolling. Even so, Google decided to disable this option. Per a Google spokesperson, continuous or infinite scrolling is starting to be disabled on the desktop version of the search engine (on our computers) starting today, and will supposedly begin doing the same for the mobile search engine “in the coming months.” Saddle.

Faster resultsAccording to Google, this change will allow the company to deliver search results faster, and will also save users from loading and displaying additional results that they didn’t request.

I didn’t like it very much. In fact, infinite scrolling doesn’t seem to be convincing users. According to Google’s comments on Search Engine Land , “automatically loading more results did not lead to significantly higher satisfaction with Google’s search engine.”

Pagination is back. If your search engine still has continuous scrolling enabled, you will soon stop seeing it and instead a pagination bar will be displayed that will give us access to a numbered list of results pages, as was the case until the advent of infinite scrolling. .

Image | Arkan Perdana

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