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Do we really need "pages" on the web?

October 22, 2007 - 2:46pm — birdie

madcow writes ""Twelve years after the debut of search engines, we have Google representing the current best-of-breed index of web pages. It is faster, smarter, and it has raised the bar for web usability several times over. And yet, we are still paging through search results ten or twenty records at a time. Unfortunately, this style of navigation has been adopted by every site that returns records from a database, regardless of the amount of data being served."

More here from Unspace."

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October 22, 2007 - 4:06pm — Chuck

pages

Yes.Join me next week when we will tackling the question: Is ice cream rich and delicious?

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October 22, 2007 - 7:00pm — Walt

Re:pages

Microsoft tried that Ajaxified approach in the beta version of Live Search that accompanied Ms. Dewey (and may still, for all I know). I've noticed that, so far, MS has had the sense *not* to migrate that "pageless" innovation to Live Search itself. I guess I understand the urge to Ajaxify everything, but pages work pretty well.

So, I guess, "Yes" is my answer too.

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October 22, 2007 - 8:09pm — madcow

Virtual Ice Cream?

The arbitrary breakup of database results into chunks in results divided by ten (and then only really retrieving the first 1000, despite what they say), does seem a bit weird in Google search. We've got several "analog" metaphors in cyberspace: MS' Office, "Desktop", recycle bin, files, etc. all borrow from our physical selves.

But having used Google Reader and Yahoo Mail Beta for some time, which just keeps pulling results from the feed as you scroll, I can see how developers can make the case for the death of "pages" as being part of an inexorable trend to leaving the old metaphors (Web 1.0??) behind.

AJAX still does bizarre things at times on different browsers, but it's what the near future seems to hold.

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