
“Goooooooooooooooooogle” is dead. No, not the company, but that long-held tradition of paginating your Google Search results at the bottom of the query page by hyperlinking all of the O’s. In a tweet today, the company revealed that an update, which eliminates the current numbered pagination system (this previously replaced the “O’s” method), is now available on desktops in the United States.
This was already implemented on the mobile web and Android prior to today. For now, this will be rolled out in English, with more languages to follow. So, instead of getting to the bottom of your screen and having to hover over and click the very next blue number in the sequence, you can simply keep scrolling.
Upon reaching the end of the first page of results, the engine will automagically lazy load another page of content for you to pick through. I personally really like this innovation and feel it’s long overdue, but there are those in the Twitter comments who are opposed to a never-ending wall of links.
One user points out how “continuous scrolling” prevents you from going back to the location where you clicked a link, causes the browser’s scroll bar to act unpredictably, and more. The new Side Search feature is certainly on Google’s mind as a way to combat some of these issues, but I do sympathize with those who prefer to keep things the way they were.
User edgarr gives those on that side of the fence a pro tip. To disable continuous scrolling, you just have to click the “Disable infinite scrolling” button found in the footer. The only challenge will be seeing the footer for long enough to click that link before it disappears in favor of more content.
This live experiment is now official, but there are several people over on the Google Support forum who have been complaining about it since all the way back in July of this year. Let me know in the comments if you prefer pagination and the manual labor of clicking the numbers at the bottom of the screen to this new method.
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