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Comment by silkodyssey | Hacker News Reader

I am current taking the search engine for a spin and it has made a great first impression. I particularly like that instead of paging the search results it displays the results on demand using ajax. I prefer this interface because with less effort I see more results. I've found that with Google I tend to not to move past the first page and by doing that I probably miss out on information that may have been useful to me.

I wonder if Google has ever considered a similar interface for their search results.

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I tried to use DDG exclusively for a month. Unfortunately, I had to drop back to google to find a lot of info. I still use DDG sometimes but for the standard stuff I search for, it doesn't fully do it for me.

Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad impressions and clicks.

The big question is how Gabriel will scale DDG with the design decisions already made.

It's quite possible that DDG can get to profitability with the layout the way it is today, maybe not as profitable as google but I don't think that would matter much.

Making a step back in income is a lot harder than foregoing a certain amount of income from the start.

Google will not do that because it would cost them a fortune in missed ad impressions and clicks.

This seems unnecessarily constraining. They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not sure they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What percentage of their revenue do you think they derive from ads placed on 'next' pages?

And certainly there would be some way that they could integrate more ads with the Ajax loads: adding them to the sidebar as you scroll, or otherwise integrating them with the incrementally added results.

> They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

That nobody except for a few geeks do it. Just like the 'I feel lucky' button.

> Certainly Google is very concerned with click-through on ads, but I'm not sure they'd be losing much if they allowed continuous scrolling. What percentage of their revenue do you think they derive from ads placed on 'next' pages?

About 32% according to their own statistics. 68% of the clicks (ads or results) are on page 1, the rest on subsequent pages.

Google is working hard to get to the point where 100% of the clicks are done on the first page, then it is a moot point, but a 32% impact to their bottom line is not something they'll do if they don't have to.

Also, yes, they could load that ad again, but I suspect that may not be as effective and would lead to a lot of complaints. A 'quiet' (as in non-animated) page creates a lot of goodwill, switching ads would likely lead to a distraction and therefore diminished user experience.

Great statistics, thanks! That's much higher than I would have guessed. While I agree that very few people change the default number of results, I would have also guessed that few click through to a second page.

Personally, I don't like the AJAX update approach. I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays. If I could set Google to return 1000 results, it would feel about right.

> I'd much rather that a site just give me a long list of results, and allow me to scroll through them without loading delays.

I think that is a balance between server load and user convenience.

On ddg it is already pretty fast, if you aren't in a real hurry it is hardly noticeable and faster than clicking through to a second page.

Well, that, and the fact that users really hate pages that are slow to load. (Although most of the loading would happen off-screen, this can still slow down users/other requests/...)

> > They already allow you change your preferences to see 100 results per search instead of the default. How does this fit with your logic?

> That nobody except for a few geeks do it. Just like the 'I feel lucky' button.

Why don't they offer this as an option then, by the same logic?

They've talked about that at some length, it is a relic from the early days and even if it costs them money (60 million bucks annually iirc) they feel they should keep it not to upset the users that have gotten used to it being there and occasionally using it.

edit: so much for my memory, it costs them almost twice that, 110 million per year, source:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Im-feeling-lucky-button-costs-Google...

Can't they just load up more ads with the additional search results at the bottom?

I don't think he needs to do much scaling - DDG needs some machines, and adding a couple of people may be useful, but it seems to do well enough so far, and expenses can't be very high. It certainly doesn't need Google's profitability to keep going...

Just in case you don't know, this plugin does that for Google, HN and a bunch of other sites: http://autopagerize.net/

It's great, except it would slow down Firefox notably for me. I haven't tried out the Chrome version.

Bing Image Search has infinite scroll without paging.

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=san+francisco

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