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Comment by deanebarker | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this. I feel like infinite scroll gets a bad rap. Pagination is no better. There are some sites and use cases where infinite scroll is a huge usability improvement.

(I know -- pagination gives you a URL to a specific page of results. Who cares? When was the last time you deep-linked into a specific index page? Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific index pagination will change.)

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Pagination is a lot better. In the example presented, most of the time the user just wants to find something on the front page. Nobody uses ctrl-F to search all of reddit.

The "front" page would be the default load of an infinite scroll, before anything has been added. Pagination or infinite scroll -- the initial load is likely the same.

> Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific index pagination will change

unless you paginate in chronological order rather than reverse chronological. but no one does.

It's easy enough. Just request the next X results after the last result on the current page, like so: `?resultsperpage=50&resultsafter=postid750`. If you're not sorting by time, then you should be able to add a time constraint to the search backend and include that parameter as well. I've also seen forums that cache the results for a certain amount of time, and only return the search ID and page number in the query string.

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