Go to Inspect element and do control + F to search for the string.
Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
11–20 of 97 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#12You'd have the same problem with pagination, you'd need to Ctrl+f on each page. Solution? Use the website's search form.
I agree with this. I feel like infinite scroll gets a bad rap. Pagination is no better. There are some sites and use cases where infinite scroll is a huge usability improvement.
(I know -- pagination gives you a URL to a specific page of results. Who cares? When was the last time you deep-linked into a specific index page? Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific index pagination will change.)
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#13Go to Inspect element and do control + F to search for the string.
That assumes the site doesn't do something funny with tags to get around the user's desire to not risk infection from malvertisements.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#14You'd have the same problem with pagination, you'd need to Ctrl+f on each page. Solution? Use the website's search form.
Yeah, but than I don't miss anything. I very much prefer it to infinite scroll, where it's possible to scroll "too fast" and miss content ...
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#15The naive way is to scroll down a ridiculous amount and then do a simple ctrl-F. It would be nice if infinite-scroll sites provided their own search function that searched through all potential content for that page. (And then probably provide those search results on an infinite-scroll page, requiring another search function to search through those search results. It's infinite scroll all the way down.)
It's exactly after realizations like this that one (unreasonably, to be very explicit) decides all the GUIs are leaky abstractions and should be avoided.
Then you want to do some math and realize how amazing visual spreadsheets are.
What I mean is, there's no perfect solution and it all depends on what you're trying to achieve.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#16You'd have the same problem with pagination, you'd need to Ctrl+f on each page. Solution? Use the website's search form.
They're similar, but at least with traditional pagination you have a very clear page transition boundary. You can manually loop through Next → Ctrl-F repeatedly much faster in my experience. With infinite scroll I'm left to work out my own "pages" by eye or some other mechanism, which is slower. Not by a lot, but still slow enough that I feel the friction.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#171. Click somewhere on the page so the scrolling works 2. Hold down Ctrl + End until a desired amount of pages loads 3. Ctrl + F to find $string
Which is useless if elements outside the viewport are garbage collected because you are browsing a virtual list. Instagram is an example but they don't have text in the elements so it's not a huge hindrance.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#18You'd have the same problem with pagination, you'd need to Ctrl+f on each page. Solution? Use the website's search form.
I agree with this. I feel like infinite scroll gets a bad rap. Pagination is no better. There are some sites and use cases where infinite scroll is a huge usability improvement. (I know -- pagination gives you a URL to a specific page of results. Who cares? When was the last time you deep-linked into a specific index page? Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific…
> Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific index pagination will change
unless you paginate in chronological order rather than reverse chronological. but no one does.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#19I see lots of replies suggesting scrolling for a long time and then using CTRL+F.
However, this won't work if the page is using virtualised scrolling (common with React et al. SPA for performance reasons, to avoid huge DOM trees as the page expands). The majority of content that is outside of the visible window will simply be unmounted from the DOM.
I'm not sure what the best-practice for a webapp designer is here? Perhaps intercepting Ctrl+F and displaying a custom search that will do the correct filtering on the back-end and update/retarget the view? Azure DevOps does this but it's still frustrating if your focused element is not within the capture point for the event.
Re: Ask HN: How do you search for $string if a webpage “supports” infinite scroll?
#20You'd have the same problem with pagination, you'd need to Ctrl+f on each page. Solution? Use the website's search form.
I agree with this. I feel like infinite scroll gets a bad rap. Pagination is no better. There are some sites and use cases where infinite scroll is a huge usability improvement. (I know -- pagination gives you a URL to a specific page of results. Who cares? When was the last time you deep-linked into a specific index page? Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific…
Pagination is a lot better. In the example presented, most of the time the user just wants to find something on the front page. Nobody uses ctrl-F to search all of reddit.