“Seeing more items faster is presumed to be a better experience”, McKinley said. But the A/B tests showed various negative effects of the feature, including fewer clicks on the results and fewer items “favorited” from the infinite results page. And curiously, while users didn’t buy fewer items overall, “they just stopped using search to find these items.”
For me personally, the author nails it with this: "But in practice, maybe they lose a sense of orientation?"
Infinite scroll just makes me feel bad, like I'm lost at sea and getting farther and farther away from the shore. I'm not sure it changes my clicks per search, but there's this creeping sense of nausea that I'm quite sure has made me more negative about using Google over the past few years. I wonder if there are a lot of cases like mine and if/how it shows up in the A/B metrics.
I do know that I avoid websites that use it, regardless of why.