Ask HN: Has Google search switched to infinite scrolling for you too now?
It seems google search has changed to using infinite scrolling for me, an incredibly annoying change.
Has anyone else got it? Is there a way to get the old pagination back?
Has anyone else got it? Is there a way to get the old pagination back?
Overall, Google has turned up the number of ads. Not just in search, but also in YouTube and also in Gmail. In YouTube, you didn't have ads in low-view-count videos. Now they have ads in all videos, whether the video owner turned it on or not. In Gmail, in the Promotions tab, only the top couple of items were ads, now there are ads interspersed with the rest of the mails.
Increasing revenue by turning up the volume of ads is very short sighted. Personally, I find Google properties less interesting now, and it is tarnishing the Google brand. So why are they doing this? Perhaps they need to fill a revenue shortfall caused by ChatGPT?
Shakes fist at sky.
Saying that as someone who has always used ad blockers but is also paying for the youtube premium family plan.
I only consume YouTube via its official app on the TV. There are no alternatives that allow ad blocking.
It's utter shit without Premium... And I'm saying this while holding some non marginal number of GOOGL class A..
I never see ads however, YouTube is not really a tv worthy outlet for me and otherwise I just AirPlay it (ad blocked).
Was it a LG TV? it could be the LG's own ad.
The good news is I found what I wanted and didn’t have to deal with a barrage of bullshit and click bait videos.
Yea I used it later on and found some user info but I’m finding that I hesitate to bother with it now.
I use an iOS Adblock tool and have replaced my native YouTube app with a shortcut to the safari site. That way Adblock works there too.
I signed up for the Premium trial. The day before the trial expired, I cancelled and deleted my card info. This was weeks ago, and I still haven't seen a single ad ever since. There are ads in the home feed, but none in the video streams themselves. I'm not using an ad blocker.
I wonder when they cut IMAP/POP3 access to Gmail.
This is I think a good example of that in action.
Another is the Google Domains shutdown. Domain names are a low margin commodity market, with a lot of competition. Someone somewhere in Google decided that for their own personal metrics selling the product was good for them. Removing a fairly thinly profitable team, and at the same time a windfall generated by them personally. It clearly should have been treated as an important value add for UX.
I do believe the penny is dropping and advertisers are beginning to see just how little Google cares about how well they are doing. As long as you continue to spend more, Google are happy, even if I'm you are making less yourself. Your advertising rep isn't their to help you improve your ads and make them more cost effective, they are there to extract more of your margin from you.
That is how a publicly traded corporation works, whether you or I like it or not. When you get a listing on stock exchanges you are asking for investment from Tom, Dick and Harry. In return you sell your soul errr provide a return on that investment, in return for more investment.
I remember when I dumped Altavista from my browser and started using the cool new Google "Do no evil". I still have a pretty early gmail address, when it was invite only and 1GB looked like close to infinity or at least pretty bloody huge. I don't put anything useful into a Google thingie because I value my stuff. I'll be changing my search engine quite soon too.
It is all rather soulless and that is what saddens me. The whole raison d'etre for Google in the early days was to do good stuff, innovative engineering and so on. Then the profit motive or bust took over. It doesn't _have_ to but it did. Sadly the two cool kids with wonderful ideas were infected with the lust for world dominance or avarice or both.
I don't know what Google would look like if it had stayed private and stuck to what appear to be its initial values. I do suspect that Brin and his mate would still have been rich beyond my wildest dreams, along with a lot of other people. MS would have probably bought them or tried to.
So, I don't think that is how publicly traded companies HAVE to work, but yes that is how they do work. Managers do the best to pump the stock for their own personal gain, and who gives a damn if it fails long term because they want to be gone before then anyway.
Anyway, just my cynical view. I have no empirical evidence.
Instead, we've got a lot of really stupid, but "easy to track" metrics. Today's top-line is easy to track, how much you've burnt through customer goodwill for tomorrow isn't.
You also see a lot of metrics engineered to be gamed. NPS probably meant something in some early original use case, but it's turned into the universal consensus that we're not allowed to actually say "I only got 4.5 star service" out of fear the $10-per-hour schlub giving us that service will be punished for things outside his control.
I wonder-- we know what theoretical research for things in CS and IT look like, but are the "academic" sides of business schools trying to come up with better metrics?
Personally I hate it, but seems like the optimal way to run an advertising company.
I'm a Brit, so we have a reasonably good Public Service Broadcaster - BBC. We do pay for it, via the TV License fee, which is basically a tax but at least we have a PSB that is tied to the values of the country (the mandate is defined by the govt) and at point of delivery is "free" (cf NHS). Yes, there are a lot of caveats that I won't dwell on here.
If you watch BBC channels or iPlayer (streaming) then you will not see any adverts, at all. A film will run from the start to the end and then you will be told what is on next plus a few "ads" on what other content is available or you have to dig out the clicker from under the dog to find something else to watch on iPlayer. The BBC currently runs four main TV channels plus radio and a lot of streaming stuff and more.
We also have ITV (Independent TeleVision), C4 (Channel 4) and C5. These are all from the analogue days and they have transitioned to digital to be joined by quite a collection.
Oh, sorry - ads ... ITV, C4, C5 and others can show ads. Because they compete with the BBC which has no ads, ad breaks are rather short.
I remember when I first saw Sky (sat. broadcaster, now all media options). They owned the lot and could do what they liked, or so they thought, and were probably right. Ad breaks were horrendously long and more frequent (probably approaching US normal)
I think I'll pass on the Sky type options and get a grip! When you find yourself whining on a SM platform about something like this, I probably ought to get out more.
Functionality, ethics/legality, and user needs are only important if they are part of the stock price calculus in the short term.
Advertisers won't buy it. They'll demand Google to measure "number of links on first load" instead.
This keeping more profit for themselves.
Which is a shame for society, as there was a real movement of people being inspired to make content because they could immediately begin earning!
Which gave us the breadth of content creators and the YouTube culture we have today.
But sadly, like many businesses, Google pulled up the drawbridge and made revenue earning creators into an exclusive club.
Recipes are a guide for unfamiliar, but once you learn the profiles of each ingredient you can expand greatly.
I know it's a bit off your comments and I certainly search myself for new basis to play with, but I hope it helps :-)
There’s nothing wrong at all with “cook by numbers” and it’s especially great if you didn’t learn to cook as a child. It’s like learning at a coding boot camp where you learn to write some simple business logic based on a spec, or learning algebra in grade 8: basically syntactic transforms with no theory.
But Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach you to look in the fridge when you’re hungry but unmotivated and quickly make something from what happens to be there that isn’t boring, faster and cheaper than ordering junk food delivery.
Yes you could turn into a fancy chef but the suggested advice is great for someone like me, who doesn’t really care particularly about food.
2. don't tell people their perception of things is wrong, instead consider why they're perceiving things that way, and if you can, do something* that may change their perception
* here, you can't
Baking is the only thing that requires some science know-how but it has its own building blocks [1] that demystify overly complicated recipes.
There aren't that many "shapes" of dishes.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ratio-Simple-Behind-Everyday-Cooking/...
1. Saute aromatic base (like onion, garlic, pepper, celery etc)
2. Deglaze
3. Add meats, non aromatic vegetables (e.g. carrot, potato)
4. Add broth, simmer
5. Garnish
All it took was asking “why” a specific ingredient was used at a specific stage in the recipe. You get a lot of answers from that.
For example one of my staples is braised chicken and vegetables. I know I can use any of certain vegetables I might have (mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, potatoes or sweet potatoes, shallots, etc), any of a couple liquids (water, chicken or vegetable stock, red or white wine, beer, etc) and spice it up with (heavy cream, fresh or dried herbs, mustard, garlic, pepper, bacon, butter, lemon, etc). And I know roughly how I want to cook it: flour the chicken and cook until brown and crispy in a pan, take it out and brown any firmer vegetables, add some spices, add the rest of the vegetables and my cooking liquid and bring to a small boil, put everything in a big oven dish, pop the chicken on top, bake at around 400 for 30-50 minutes until the chicken seems done, add any last things that might burn like cream in the final 5 minutes and then plate up and eat.
Now I don't have to go to the store and look for anything, don't have to worry too much about measuring ingredients, don't have to worry about cook time or technique. I can whip up a big family dinner pretty quickly with whatever I have on hand and experiment a bit with different flavors with confidence that it will turn out good.
https://gizmodo.com/googles-algorithm-is-lying-to-you-about-...
>I knew from personal experience that this was a lie. Recipes always said it took 5 or 10 minutes to caramelize onions, and when you followed the recipes, you either got slightly cooked onions or you ended up 40 minutes behind schedule. So I caramelized some onions and recorded how long it really took—28 minutes if you cooked them as hot as possible and constantly stirred them, 45 minutes if you were sane about it—and I published those results on Slate, along with a denunciation of the false five-to-10 minute standard.
Trusting Google is just as apt to get you in trouble.
It's shocking how gpt has almost no utility though because you can't actually TRUST anything it says. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.
The first page is just the same few domains. Meanwhile, websites dedicated to the disease and often maintained by supportive communities languish at the bottom of the pile.
Why? Because Google decided that “authority” of domains is important, not the content. So a generic article on WebMD will rank higher than a forum page filled with mountains of information from actual patients and medical professionals.
The drop-off in results has been extremely pronounced for me, both for text and image search. Queries that should easily generate dozens of pages instead result in 1-3. The results are rarely what I’m looking for. It’s slowly been driving me crazy.
At this point, l’ve switched to mostly using individual site’s search functionality (GitHub, Stack Overflow, etc or using site: ) and bookmarking/taking notes on anything more obscure. I’m at a point where I’m tempted to scrape and index my bookmarks so I can search locally. Link discovery is a different matter of course.
You rarely go to even the second page, I'm almost always improving/changing the query instead of going to next pages, so even in those edge cases where I have to go to next pages, then auto loading next results when I'm at the bottom of the page seems viable solution
Infinite scroll is annoying because e.g you cannot link to thing
but that's not the case with Google - you do not link Google results to people, you send them the result itself - desired website.
You might not, I do, I do a lot, I even go further. I personally don't like the change at all
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
there really are. For Google the results past the top ten have been unusable for a very long time, frequently just a repetition of the same garbage.
Circa 2004 I was interested in the question of why Google was so much better than other search engines, which got me into reading TREC proceedings which made it clear that Google probably wouldn't do very well on TREC because the original TREC scores assumes you care about the relevance of the 1000th result and Google was all about "I'm feeling lucky".
A month or so ago I was talking to someone developing a search engine who was concerned that most tracks in TREC now are concerned about precision @ 1, precision @ 5 and things like that and was wondering how to tune up a search engine if the 1000th result matters.
I guess things go full circle.
I can't decide what's more annoying though, the infinite scroll or the search result layout change.
But Google results are ephemeral and change constantly. I've never heard of anyone wanting to bookmark the second page of search results.
I agree infinite scroll doesn't make sense on all sites, but for internet search results it's perfect.
Having to page through ephemeral search results is just added friction. I'm already scrolling anyways so this is much better UX.
Infinite scroll is also annoying because it often breaks when navigating back to the page.
Since this is a very popular use case in the context of a search page, I’m not a fan of this change.
In practice when I go to youtube’s search page (safari mobile), scroll down past infinite scrolling, click a random video and go back, I don’t see the video that I clicked on my screen.
I haven’t seen the google’s search page with infinite scrolling. But even if it works now, I’d be worried that it would break in future, since so many popular websites don’t care about that.
Maybe there’s a reason why popular websites don’t care?
Why “worry” about (possibly) expected features “breaking”? Seems extreme. Bugs happen. Sometimes they get fixed. Sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes there's no good result in the first page, or I want to keep searching for more investigation.
When I find a seemingly interesting result after several scrolls and visit the page but find out it's not what I want, I want to go back to the search result and continue. But after browser back, the result is cleared and I have to scroll several times again. Even if I open the result in the different tabs and keep the search result, it may disappear after browser refresh or restart.
Twitter handles this masterfully (or used to)
> or page refresh.
Technically you can use history.replaceState to store, ahem, state on the "current page", so nothing stops you from saving a cursor there to use when loading the content.
The issue with infinite scroll is that very few people know how or care to "make it work correctly"
But once you call history.pushState, the browser is relinquishing control to you. At that point, going “back” only changes the URL, as far as the browser is concerned, and that part is instantaneous.
There are other reasons. It's annoying to me because on mobile there's a link I use often that's only in the footer of the page.
And yep, the link is still there in the infinite scroll version of the results page - if you swipe violently downward several times then after 3-4 refreshes it gives up, and you can click footer links.
(The link in question is "see results in English" - which I use often due to my region and because I use incognito tabs for random google searches.)
It makes sense when your incentive is to sell more ad impressions.
And the next logical step is to further reduce result quality so you have to scroll for more ad impressions.
It shows they are now treating the landing page as an ad revenue generator with no bounds, it’s no longer primarily a signals play.
I used to utilize the vaguely related deep-dive results, especially in image searches, to go on tours of nostalgia or just wandering. But Google can’t offer that anymore.
It’s completely rational for them, their business model is no longer aligned with giving you the top result and people from past conditioning won’t go page 2 because they know nothing of value is there.
So if you want more ad revenue shitty results and infinite scroll are a match made in heaven
I haven't dared go back into settings to see if it's still set to infinite scroll (I assume not) because I don't want to break it any more.
I'm used to things randomly breaking in youtube, in the play queue, for example, but I thought this was kind of a shocking level of breakage to find in an online behemoth's primary offering, especially given how essentially simple its presentation task is.
Seems they might be still fiddling with it, though - searched the term slashdot and found "About 14,000,000 results (0.28 seconds)", but the bottom of the page only shows links to three pages of results, expanding to seven when I click "next".
I wonder what they think they're doing? Probably too much remote working, I expect. That'll be it.
Looking for alternative suggestions for:
1. Google Maps (yikes was it bad when I used it this week) 2. Google Docs (such a frustrating lack of features) 3. Google Drive (it's impossible to find anything when you are sharing docs with someone) 4. Google Search (ChatGPT has spoiled me and I find Google Search to be a large waste of time) 5. Google Classroom (their quizzes/homeworks/forms are unbelievable bad and I can't tell what students can see vs what they can't) 6. Gmail (I've love gmail for so long but with all the other products just being so bad it's making me wonder what else I'm missing something better)
Sorry to sh!t on Google so much, but everything is just so mediocre that I'm tired of it and want something higher quality. Anyone have thoughts?
I hope you're not blindly trusting answers. I experimented with ChatGPT for a while and (even when using the GPT-4 model) I would get answers that were false but didn't sound too unreasonable. I could have easily been misled if I didn't already know the answers to the things I was asking it.
Wps, only office, Zoho docs
Offline only office is really nice
Nextcloud
Searxng
Zoho mail is like Gmail a decade ago, protonmail is decent too
That said, for mobile use Organic Maps is pretty good: https://organicmaps.app/
On the whole this assertion of always-available javascript has basically destroyed the usability of the web as every small minded manager/designer thinks that inserting themselves in the way of the user makes for some endearing "experience". It doesn't.
However, the selection of individual pages is gone, and replaced by a single "More results" arrow at the bottom of the page. So it does appear that they've gutted the functionality, and it's only continuous scrolling whether you choose manual or automatic style.
The other thing that's annoying me is the overriding of cursor keys, making each scrolling step much larger than it would normally be. Yes, it might be more logical for a keypress to step to the next result, but that's not how the cursor keys are expected to behave in the browser, so it's jarring.
I get your meaning but it's kind of a funny phrase to mean "no downsides to this one agent, me"
This is a common problem with infinite scroll websites, not just Google of course.
A more human reason is that personally, I like to portion out and chunk off parts as no longer requiring my attention. I read a page and move on, clear the mental cache and start again. Infinite scrolls can mess with my focus.
Are you logged in? I have disabled infinite scrolling, and I still have selection of individual pages.
But if I open an incognito window and disable infinite scrolling, I get the same "More results" as you, so I'm wondering if it's related to being logged in or not.
The same thing has happened with Microsoft. I used to be a Windows/GUI user (never in love with the company going back to DOS, I was a PC-DOS user (IBM)) until I switched over to Linux many years ago. Microsoft basically ceased to exist (except for github).
I hear Microsoft in the news and it's almost like they exist in a parallel universe.
Apple - never has existed (for me). Facebook/Twitter - accts but never use. Spotify - nope. Etc, etc...
The only reason I bring this up is because, despite this, I still remain well-connected. I have lost nothing from the Web. I strongly feel that the hold these big tech companies have on many of us is tenuous at best. Google best not forget this.
Reddit certainly has forgotten and with but a metaphorical wave of my hand, reddit now too ceases to exist (for me) - and I've lost little. Big Tech... replaceable (hmm... mostly).
PS: Still rely/use Google (gmail, YouTube, Maps, Android), so there's one big tech firm I still depend on. YouTube, Maps and Android being the really hard ones to replace.
Few bad quarters and I am sure some PM at Google will write a brief for A/B testing removal of Ad label
Then as a business or blog that wants to get indexed, I feel like the friction no longer being a >= page 2 result is going to surface more content and get more clicks.
I guess it will allow for more ads with potentially better click through on ads as well.
I was thinking about getting a VPN and using Google with a country that still has the old Google Search...
Before we get to the 7 reasons, let’s describe what Google is …
Try Baidu. Its search index is much bigger, and even if you don't speak chinese it is very usable. I frequently find what I'm looking for there when Google fails me.
But when Google says no results, I'd prefer to wade through a fre pages of spam than to simply not find what I'm looking for.