A year and a half+ ago, Aza Raskin, a GUI contractor of sorts-dash-son of Jef Raskin, inventor of the (original pre-Jobs/ appliance concept) Macintosh, answered a public question from "a Googler" on how to clean up specific portions of the Search returns page.

This is a complex issue, and thus hardly answerable in mere para or two of a blog post, but, for what it is worth, Aza's off-the-hip suggestion was to "remove the pagination from the Google search results [...] the solution [would have to be] a good implementation of an non-intrusive infinite scroll."

http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2006/04/25/no_more_more_pages/

Given Google's need to deliver more-or-less same output in truly platform-independent fashion, meaning not solely square visual displays whose acres of screen real estate might indeed invite some innovative alt.means of "scrolling," I wonder how Raskin would replace the end-of-this-page/fetch-more marker (in symbolic sense) elsewhere???

This particular thread has been blogged/ commented here before....

[ http://www.shmula.com/441/aza-raskin-on-google-search-results]

An "infinite scroll" is counterintuitive to Google's mission which is, returning the most relevant result to the user. It seems silly to return millions or billions of results in one page don't you think?

<< It seems silly to return millions or billions of results in one page don't you think? >>

They would likely return only a maximum of 1000 results (as that's their current maximum) and they would only dynamically load results into the page as they are needed, so it would be no different than now, except for there being no requirement to click between pages.

Suddenly, it would be less important for people to get their site in the top 10 results though, as people wouldn't necessarily stop looking after the first 10-20 results... instead, they'd just keep on scrolling until the results looked irrelevant.

There are Greasemonkey scripts for this and CustomizeGoogle includes this feature:
http://www.customizegoogle.com/stream-google-search-result-pages.html

I bet this "infinite scroll" hasn't been evaluated for ergonomic suitability in real-life, as opposed to academic, use sceanarios. Meaning: "does it make searches more effective"? I don't doubt its potential for utter K3WLLNESS.