However, even though the site is ruined for me now, I really want to thank Internet Archive for all the years of enjoyment it has given me.
So, first I'd like to make clear that none of the underlying collections or data has moved anywhere. That is, all the items that are in a collection of, say, newspapers or music performances are still there - the URLs are precisely the same and were designed to be permanent. Nobody's shifting those around here. Google searches work, and the site search works the same, using the same criteria.
Next, in the results pages, which include those "tiles" and infinite scrolling that is not to you taste, if you look in the upper right (next to the "Results" number), there's an icon that changes from tile mode to "list" mode. You can also turn on "details". That makes things into a list form, at least. However, for the moment, infinite scroll will still be engaged. Also note you can sort the list alphabetically, by creator, or by views.
After doing those two steps, is the problem at that point JUST the infinite scroll? Is that what makes it a mess for you? Or is it a different set of issues? I'm happy to hear it in this thread, but also, if you click the "beta" button in the upper right, and write exactly what you'd like, I guarantee it's read.
Please reduce or make your JavaScript a bit more efficient - mobile devices have little RAM. (cut the JQuery-extensions)
The Wayback Maschine (https://archive.org/web/) could look more lean like the Google frontpage.
That said, two annoyances I just noticed with the list view (braindump style):
There is no header. I have no idea what the columns are. I can only guess, and that is useless for e.g. the rightmost column here [0]. Mental thoughts as I view it: It's just an icon? It's not clickable and doesn't appear to show anything useful. The speakers change to blue when I have my mouse over them. What does this mean? It's still not clickable... what is it doing?
Another problem related to not having a header: when I sort by e.g. views, the views are not actually shown. Maybe I wanted to see that information as well as having the rows sorted by the column.
Oh wait, I just noticed that there is a header there... but it's not clear it's for the columns of the table underneath it. They're not aligned... and it still doesn't explain what that column of icons is. But now I see that the number of views is shown as the leftmost column. I guessed that it was some sort of filesize initially (1.6B, 377.7M, etc.).
One last thing, I wish clicking the column in the header would toggle ascending/descending sorting like almost every other table I've interacted with. It's not clear at first that I need to go all the way over to the left to toggle that behaviour.
> now it's a big mess ... for smartphones
This would have been very much appreciated if you pointed out specific things in the new design which you don't like.
In-fact, as a developer, I even think that styling the website from dev-tools to make it look (almost) like you want is a very good idea and helpful to the site developers. It can be a good way to "thank", since you "really want to thank".