14 DAY TRIAL // Google is once again playing with the idea of infinite scroll in the search results and is now testing a version of the site that offers a "See more results" button at the bottom of the page, rather than links to the other result pages.
The idea of infinite scroll has been passed around for years now and Google may have experimented with it, or at least a version of it, in the past.
By definition, infinite scroll, means that there are no pages to switch to and from, everything is in one long page.
The concept has been adapted by many sites that feature a content stream, such as the news feeds in Facebook or Twitter, or, indeed, search results.
Scroll down in Twitter to the bottom of the page, and more tweets are automatically added. Even Google does this, scroll down in the image search results page and more photos are loaded for quite a long time.
The name infinite scroll is a bit misleading since it's never exactly infinite. Scroll down far enough and you get to the end of the image search results page in Google.
For the main search engine, Google is using a similar approach. If you reach the bottom, you can get more results without loading a new page, but you have to click on a button to do so.
Users rarely go beyond the first three search results in Google. They even more rarely venture beyond the first page. Having infinite scroll will probably not change that by a whole lot, but it is likely that users will more often load more than just the first 10 results.
Of course, Google is always testing new features and changes, and some of them end up going nowhere. The company has been thinking about infinite scroll for a while now, but nothing has come of it yet, and there's no guarantee that this latest experiment will be the one that makes it.