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Comment by fein | Hacker News Reader

I have a few main requirements for what I consider easy to use pagination.

1. I can set how many items per page.

2. I can get to an arbitrary page either through a path/ query param or at least close with a pagination row that contains a way to jump around. If an item gets removed, whatever I was looking for should still be in the same vicinity.

3. As a result of #1 and #2, I can go back and find items I saw previously because their placement is at some fairly reliable position on the page I remember it being on or around.

You know, like how a physical book or catalogue with pages works.

Please stop trying to improve on this and making usability more difficult. I hate infinity scroll and I hate not being able to pick my page in an intuitive fashion.

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>I can get to an arbitrary page either through a path/ query param or at least close with a pagination row that contains a way to jump around

I've had quite a few heated discussions on this point. The problem is, once your dataset gets large enough, this use case is incredibly difficult to scale; not impossible (Google does it with millions of search results), but prohibitively expensive compared to how often the need of being able to jump to any specific page arises.

Now I always try to stick to cursor based pagination as the default in order to prevent people from building workflows on top of offsets.

> Google does it with millions of search results

Google cheats, but in a way that very few users will notice. You can only access the first 20 pages of search results. Depending on user behavior, this is one way to offer navigation via page number while limiting worst-case cost.

I doubt that 21st page actually exists, even on the back end.

I would bet the top-line number of results is some sort of extrapolated estimation thing, a hand-wavey way to represent how deep the hypothetical result set is for that query.

It definitely is an estimate. If you search for a rare enough term that there aren't 20 pages of results, it can still estimate thousands of results until you call its bluff by going to a later page, at which point the estimate is replaced by the actual number.

I totally agree with you from a usability standpoint, and while it is possible to make this work well, for larger-scale services it is rarely without costs, and for the most part - people don't seem to care as much as you'd think.

While it can be frustrating, I doubt much revenue (relatively speaking) was lost due to this issue, which means for most apps and services, it will likely not get done.

(I'm not disputing the merit of your arguments, just explaining why this will rarely get done well in real life...)

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