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Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that few people realize that Google has a page limit shows how rarely people actually want more pages.

I used to (years and years ago) go past the first page pretty often, but results are so bad now that it rarely helps, so I almost never even click "2", let alone later pages. It's all gonna be obviously-irrelevant crap google "helpfully" found for me or the auto-generated spam that google used to try to fight (circa 2008 and earlier) but no longer seems to, just letting it gunk up and dominate up any results you get that aren't from a handful of top sites.

So this is in part one of those "we broke a thing and now no-one uses it, guess they didn't want it!"

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What's really weird is that sometimes you get results that are outright repeating on those first N pages. Sometimes, more than once.

It's almost as if it tries to pad the output to be long enough that you'd lose patience before you reach the end of "effective pagination".

The thing has always been "broken". Google has had a page limit for at least a decade.

No, by "broken" I mean "let lazy auto-generated spam take over the results almost completely". So now those of us who did used to browse past page one (which, to be fair, may not have been many people) don't bother anymore.

[EDIT] For those who weren't around for it, Google used to play cat-n-mouse with spam-site operators. It'd go through cycles where results would slowly get worse, then suddenly a ton better, though never as bad as they are today. Around '08 or '09 they (evidently, I'm just judging from the search engine's behavior starting around then and continuing to this day) seemed to give up and just boosted a relatively small set of sites way up the results, abandoning the rest to the spammers.

Kagi has been working very well for me as an alternative

Part of the difficulty is, if very few people are browsing to page 2, deciding what to put on page 2 becomes harder and harder.

Google has a lot of user behavior signals to decide what should be in results 1-10. Deciding if a page should be ranked 20, 200, or 2000 without any user clicks to check if you're right is really difficult.

I would bet that since 2008/9, the relative numbers of spam site operators, Google engineers, second-page searches have changed significantly.

I find search results are frequently even worse than this, in that the first page will have nothing useful, with about three good links split between the second and third page. If I'm lucky.

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