Infinite on a Web Page. Yep, Infinite Annoyance

July 18, 2011

Have you noticed that “innovations” in search get in the way of finding relevant information quickly.

Quick example. I am at my desk at 0900 on July 16, a Saturday in Nowhere, Kentucky. Our houseguests were on the way to the Louisville Zoo to see the polar bear. (I thought these poor creatures had been eliminated in the global warming that some folks in Harrod’s Creek don’t think is real. Guess I was wrong.)

Now I get a call. Bzzz.

My wife wants to know the phone number of the tire story on Goose Creek Road (no joke, it’s really Goose Creek) and Westport Road. I think the tire store is a BF Goodrich affiliate. I key in to Bing, then Google the following “BF Goodrich Goose Creek Road Louisville Kentucky”. Guess what! No tire store. I could not locate the tire store which I saw last night on the way home from the gym.

How did I find the tire store? I looked in an old copy of the Yellow Pages.

So much for the personalization, the fancy mash up functions, and the other baloney generated in pursuit of clicks and ad revenue.

Now I learn that I may not see tidy result pages with a reasonable number of hits. I like these fixed length pages because I have some weird ability to remember where I was in a fixed space like a Web page or a giant spreadsheet. When the fixed page is infinite, I have no clue where I was “located.”

Google Experimenting with Infinite Scrolling on Search Result Pages! reminded me of the infinite pictures display on Bing. The latency of that “feature” was enough to relegate Bing.com to the last seat on the goose’s softball team. Bing often never gets in the game. Google imitated the function which I had seen demonstrated a long time ago by an outfit in Israel, whose name I lost when I looked for it a moment ago in Google. Sigh.

My view is that if someone thinks “infinite”, the thought is addled. If you have to do these silly user experience features, rethink where the search box is. Who wants to scroll up an infinite – x vector to reframe a query. Oh, I forgot. Google will predict what I want so who needs to reframe a query.

Wow. Wow. Wow. The real world exhibits latency. I guess in Google Land, latency is trivial, maybe irrelevant. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011

Freebie just like ad supported search engines. But at what “cost”?

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Google, News, Search, User experience

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.