A "novelty" in the approach to the presentation of results, but which is already well established on many other sites.
A few days ago, Google announced the implementation of a technical innovation on its search engine. The idea is to thoroughly review the system of presentation of results on so-called " desktop " computers (classic PCs in short). So, instead of displaying the results of a user's request in multiple pages that must be successively "turned", Google has decided to implement what is known in the industry as "continuous scrolling".
As we said in the preamble, this is not a technical novelty in the strict sense of the word, since many sites already use such a system to present their content. In fact, even for Google this is not exactly a novelty: the mobile version of the search engine already returns the results of queries in this way. That said, it's still interesting for several reasons. First of all, continuous scrolling is something much more frequent and finally much more logical because of the way a site is viewed on mobile.
Starting today, we're bringing continuous scrolling to desktop in English in the U.S. so you can continue to see more search results easily. When you reach the bottom of a search results page, you'll now be able to see up to six pages of results. pic.twitter.com/xIuVP24FFm
- Google (@Google) December 5, 2022
Moreover, the display of pages with ten proposals each on a desktop PC is a "historical" legacy for Google, an element that has forged the identity of the site, but also the way of conceiving the positioning of sites in relation to each other: we often refer to the positioning on "page one" as a relatively correct referencing, while it is bad when you have to go to the next page - page two, therefore - to appear. The introduction of this feature therefore breaks this system of thought: Google gathers all the results of 6 search pages in continuous scrolling and it is only after these six pages that a "see more" button is presented to the user.
However, you should know that this new Google feature will not be deployed everywhere at the same time. The search engine announced on December 5 that the system is currently only used in the United States, for English-language searches. However, we can assume that unless there is a very negative feedback, Google will proceed to its generalization. We will probably have to review our search habits, but even more so our way of thinking about referencing: of course, the first two or three results will always be the most visited, but being 9th, 10th, 11th or 12th will probably no longer have the same importance.
