Google is phasing out paginated search results in favor of a more natural layout. This change will take effect on October 1st, 2020. Paginated results are often used to show a list of results in a specific order, which can be helpful when looking for a specific item. However, pagination can also make it difficult to find the exact result you’re looking for.
Google’s iconic page picker has been a staple feature ever since the search engine was first launched in 1998. But now, it’s going away, as Google is implementing a new infinite scrolling feature on its search results on the desktop to see more results.
Our phones have had infinite scrolling on Google search results for a long time, but on the web, we instead had a page picker at the bottom. That’s being removed entirely now — if you reach the bottom of your Google search results, you’ll soon instead see a loading icon, and what’s supposed to be the next page will show up below. So now, if you can’t find what you’re looking for on the first few page results, you just need to keep scrolling down until you find it rather than having to seek through multiple pages of results.
While infinite scrolling makes way more sense from a UX standpoint, there was still a nostalgic element to seeing the “Goooooooooogle” page picker at the bottom and clicking one of the o letters to get to the page you’re looking for. But this change is probably for the better, seeing how the alternative was to manually load pages of results one at a time.
The change isn’t live on our end just yet, but it should just be a matter of time before it’s here for everyone.
Source: Search Engine Land
