Ask HN: Has Google search switched to infinite scrolling for you too now?

The other thing that's annoying me is the overriding of cursor keys, making each scrolling step much larger than it would normally be. Yes, it might be more logical for a keypress to step to the next result, but that's not how the cursor keys are expected to behave in the browser, so it's jarring.

I get your meaning but it's kind of a funny phrase to mean "no downsides to this one agent, me"

A more human reason is that personally, I like to portion out and chunk off parts as no longer requiring my attention. I read a page and move on, clear the mental cache and start again. Infinite scrolls can mess with my focus.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

there really are. For Google the results past the top ten have been unusable for a very long time, frequently just a repetition of the same garbage.

Circa 2004 I was interested in the question of why Google was so much better than other search engines, which got me into reading TREC proceedings which made it clear that Google probably wouldn't do very well on TREC because the original TREC scores assumes you care about the relevance of the 1000th result and Google was all about "I'm feeling lucky".

A month or so ago I was talking to someone developing a search engine who was concerned that most tracks in TREC now are concerned about precision @ 1, precision @ 5 and things like that and was wondering how to tune up a search engine if the 1000th result matters.

I guess things go full circle.

I can't decide what's more annoying though, the infinite scroll or the search result layout change.

In practice when I go to youtube’s search page (safari mobile), scroll down past infinite scrolling, click a random video and go back, I don’t see the video that I clicked on my screen.

I haven’t seen the google’s search page with infinite scrolling. But even if it works now, I’d be worried that it would break in future, since so many popular websites don’t care about that.

There’s nothing wrong at all with “cook by numbers” and it’s especially great if you didn’t learn to cook as a child. It’s like learning at a coding boot camp where you learn to write some simple business logic based on a spec, or learning algebra in grade 8: basically syntactic transforms with no theory.

But Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach you to look in the fridge when you’re hungry but unmotivated and quickly make something from what happens to be there that isn’t boring, faster and cheaper than ordering junk food delivery.

Yes you could turn into a fancy chef but the suggested advice is great for someone like me, who doesn’t really care particularly about food.

All it took was asking “why” a specific ingredient was used at a specific stage in the recipe. You get a lot of answers from that.

For example one of my staples is braised chicken and vegetables. I know I can use any of certain vegetables I might have (mushrooms, onions, celery, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussel sprouts, potatoes or sweet potatoes, shallots, etc), any of a couple liquids (water, chicken or vegetable stock, red or white wine, beer, etc) and spice it up with (heavy cream, fresh or dried herbs, mustard, garlic, pepper, bacon, butter, lemon, etc). And I know roughly how I want to cook it: flour the chicken and cook until brown and crispy in a pan, take it out and brown any firmer vegetables, add some spices, add the rest of the vegetables and my cooking liquid and bring to a small boil, put everything in a big oven dish, pop the chicken on top, bake at around 400 for 30-50 minutes until the chicken seems done, add any last things that might burn like cream in the final 5 minutes and then plate up and eat.

Now I don't have to go to the store and look for anything, don't have to worry too much about measuring ingredients, don't have to worry about cook time or technique. I can whip up a big family dinner pretty quickly with whatever I have on hand and experiment a bit with different flavors with confidence that it will turn out good.

The good news is I found what I wanted and didn’t have to deal with a barrage of bullshit and click bait videos.

Yea I used it later on and found some user info but I’m finding that I hesitate to bother with it now.

I use an iOS Adblock tool and have replaced my native YouTube app with a shortcut to the safari site. That way Adblock works there too.

That is how a publicly traded corporation works, whether you or I like it or not. When you get a listing on stock exchanges you are asking for investment from Tom, Dick and Harry. In return you sell your soul errr provide a return on that investment, in return for more investment.

I remember when I dumped Altavista from my browser and started using the cool new Google "Do no evil". I still have a pretty early gmail address, when it was invite only and 1GB looked like close to infinity or at least pretty bloody huge. I don't put anything useful into a Google thingie because I value my stuff. I'll be changing my search engine quite soon too.

It is all rather soulless and that is what saddens me. The whole raison d'etre for Google in the early days was to do good stuff, innovative engineering and so on. Then the profit motive or bust took over. It doesn't _have_ to but it did. Sadly the two cool kids with wonderful ideas were infected with the lust for world dominance or avarice or both.

I don't know what Google would look like if it had stayed private and stuck to what appear to be its initial values. I do suspect that Brin and his mate would still have been rich beyond my wildest dreams, along with a lot of other people. MS would have probably bought them or tried to.

Personally I hate it, but seems like the optimal way to run an advertising company.