With distinct pages it's easy to bookmark them and/or remember "oh, there was something interesting on page three." With infinite scroll, that interesting thing becomes lost in a maze of twisty passages and more difficult to return to because you are never on an individual static page, but rather a single ever-changing page.

I used to often do a minimum of 5 pages when I was doing any sort of serious research to start checking the more esoteric and less SEO optimized results. The infinite scroll has definitely been annoying for me

In theory there might be more than ten interesting results on a topic, and with some search engines, say the one at

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

there really are. For Google the results past the top ten have been unusable for a very long time, frequently just a repetition of the same garbage.

Circa 2004 I was interested in the question of why Google was so much better than other search engines, which got me into reading TREC proceedings which made it clear that Google probably wouldn't do very well on TREC because the original TREC scores assumes you care about the relevance of the 1000th result and Google was all about "I'm feeling lucky".

A month or so ago I was talking to someone developing a search engine who was concerned that most tracks in TREC now are concerned about precision @ 1, precision @ 5 and things like that and was wondering how to tune up a search engine if the 1000th result matters.

I guess things go full circle.

In cases where the result wasn't on the previous page.

I can't decide what's more annoying though, the infinite scroll or the search result layout change.

If your first language is English, and you end up using Google in a non-Anglophonic country, the option to change language (without going through sign-in hoops) is a drop-down at the bottom. The infinite scrolling, where results get lazy-loaded is really irksome in that case.