Continuous scrolling for mobile brings Google Search into the modern age

If you’re accustomed to browsing several pages to find what you need on Google Search using your phone, you’ll probably have noticed already that you no longer need to click to navigate between each new page of results. Google has officially rolled out “Continuous scrolling“, bringing Search into the 21st century.

Earlier this year, the company launched a redesign for its core service that helped spotlight information, made it easier to read with bolder, larger text, more white space, and color, and all-around just made it more “Googley”. Additionally, it gave everything from the search bar, the search icon, and so on a more rounded-off look to match its new logo.

Removing the pagination on the platform means that you’ll spend less time clicking, and more time looking. I personally feel that Google does a fantastic job of placing the most relevant search results on the first page, but if you’re browsing recipes or something similar that’s meant to be inspirational or educational instead of just informational, then this seems like it will be more useful to you.

Upon reaching the bottom of the page, a quick second will pass before more results magically appear for your convenience. More seamless and intuitive is better, right? Most companies, including Google, have used this technology to lazy load content for many years now, but it’s likely that Search has remained paginated for familiarity and nostalgia.

Before having the “See more” button at the bottom, Google had next and previous buttons, and before that, its iconic “Gooooooooooooooooogle” navigation. Yep, you know the one – each “O” represented another page. This was meant to be a play on the number that Google’s name was derived from – the Googolplex.

If a googol isn’t big enough for you, there are even bigger numbers out there! One of them is a googolplex, which is a 1 followed by a googol of zeros. The scientific notation for a googolplex is 1 x 10^{10^100}

As massive as a googol is, a googolplex is many, many times larger, such that it’s impossible to write all the zeros out. There’d be ten-duotrigintillion of them! 

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Apparently, a googol is such a large number that our minds couldn’t possibly comprehend it. Nothing on earth – not even grains of sand, or drops of water in the ocean come close to that number (except maybe chess move possibilities), and a googolplex is much larger! When you put it into perspective, Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful means that it has or hopes to have a googolplex of data, and stopping you page by page is no longer sufficient. That’s both reassuring and terrifying all at once, wouldn’t you say?

At this time, Continuous scrolling is rolling out on most English searches for phones in the U.S. Let us know in the comments if you’ve already encountered it. I’m still seeing the “See more” button on my Pixel 4, so it’s probably one of the company’s infamous staged rollouts. One day, we’ll look back and see the idea of having to jump between result pages as ridiculous and antiquated. Oh wait, we already do.

Photo by Arkan Perdana on Unsplash