Google has confirmed that they are indeed testing a form of infinite scroll web search results.
I covered the news this morning at the Search Engine Roundtable sharing a screen shot from WebmasterWorld and a video from Waebo of this in action.
Here is the video:
As you can see, Google replaced the pagination feature from the bottom, where it says, “Gooooogle” and put a link that reads “show more results”. Clicking on that will load an additional set of search results directly below the first set of results.
A Google spokesperson confirmed this test saying, “Google is constantly experimenting with new features.”
Google has previously denied an infinite scroll test in November of last year, blaming it on a Chrome extension. But this new test, seems to be the real thing.
Will this last, I am not sure but we do know Google has infinite scroll on image search.
Here is a picture:
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Related Topics: Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search | Top News
I haven’t see the “Infinite Scroll” in any results personally, but I’m liking where this is going and am excited to see how this may impact clicks for deeper results.
I don’t mind the infinite results, but I hope it doesn’t end up like Facebook, where it automatically loads more results as you scroll down the page. The other day I wanted to click a link on the bottom of the Facebook page and it was annoying how it kept making me scroll further.
Excited to see this feature. Providing one step to view additional results is much more exciting than selecting “1,2″3″……but… i wonder if this will effect Google’s Adwords platform.
Google was actually testing infinite scroll long time ago in the flash version of SearchMash.
There are a couple of Google Plugins for Firefox that allow you to sort the results in multiple columns, show a preview of the site and have infinite scrolling. The infinite scrolling feature was pretty neat. Haven’t seen that on my SERP yet.
I agree that it looks neat and sounds revolutionary in theory, but as a Facebook user, I do not find it practical enough. The cons outweigh the pros in my opinion.
As CFI mentioned above, if it loads the content automatically, accessing a link in the footer is almost impossible. And going back to the top to peruse the first page’s results again involves too much scrolling (hence the term ‘infinite scrolling’). I don’t think it also increases the number of search pages viewed either. On average I check the first 3 Google search result pages, and on Facebook I noticed that I usually stop scrolling after 3 ‘page loads’ of the news feed.
I would recommend they do a lot of sample testing to see if it really will increase page result visibility before they decide to go with this. There’s a reason why we read books with pages now and no longer have just one big scroll of parchment. I don’t think we’d easily go back to those days, it makes little sense in terms of progress.