Remember when Google brought continuous scrolling to Search on desktop, back in December 2022? Well, now the company has reversed that decision, and ditched continuous scrolling in favor of pagination.
The news comes via Search Engine Land, who spoke to a Google spokesperson, reporting that continuous scrolling in search results will be gone starting June 25. The same thing will happen to mobile search results in the “coming months.”
We can still see continuous scrolling on Google Search both on desktop and mobile at the time of writing, and we’re guessing it just takes some time for changes to go live for everyone.
Mashable Light Speed
According to Google, the change is about being able to serve results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that haven’t been requested. The company also said that continuous scrolling didn’t lead to “significantly higher” user satisfaction with Google Search.
We’d add that Google Search results becoming noticeably worse (which Google disputes) likely also had something to do with user satisfaction, but don’t mind us.
The pagination will apparently look just like it did before, with an elongated “Gooooooooogle” logo with pages from 1 to 10 listed below.
It’s worth noting that the change might be bad news for some, as the pages which are on the second, third, and subsequent pages might get less clicks. For most users, faster loading of search results is an obvious benefit, though it would be nice if said search results had less ads and spam in them, too.
