What is going on with Google’s Pagination in the Chrome Web Store?
I’ve used Chrome for quite a while. It is quick, runs well, handles 20 open tabs and doesn’t have the memory leak I always had with Firefox. With Chrome, 20-30 days between restarts aren’t uncommon – Firefox would get a week or so before it was too sluggish and required a restart.
However, while I was looking at the Chrome Web Store I was a little confused about some of the pagination issues I ran into. I went to the Productivity Apps to see what was new, and the pagination at the bottom was confusing.
These first three are looking at the top applications. As you go through the pages, the pagination string just changes the endpoint so that on the first page, you see pages 1 through 9 and next. By the time you get to Page 9, you are presented with pages 1 through 17.
However, when we look at Most Popular Utilities Apps, pagination breaks in a much different manner:
I tried to think of a logical explanation for it breaking in different manners in different places. Perhaps the pagination code was written by different groups which explains why the start point is not incremented as the endpoint is on the Top Applications. However, as you page through the Utilities, pagination works, the itemset count changes, at one point you only have Prev/Next, then mysteriously the pagination works again. The only real theory I could come up with here was the fact that http is stateless and I’m being shuffled to a different data center or node, but, the pagination issue is repeatable which might throw that theory into the wind.
Thoughts?
Tags: Chrome App Store, pagination
January 12th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
Other than the prev/next being the only things showing up it looks like they just estimate the total number of items and it gets more accurate the further you go. Also it seems to always show 8 pages ahead of where you currently are if there are 8 pages of items. This way they don’t actually have to do a count of how many items there are. The pagination on Google’s search results work similarly.
January 13th, 2011 at 12:28 am
But with ‘Most Popular Apps’ it shows pages 1-9, then 1-7, then 1-11 for two pages. It is really odd behavior and the number of items in the set changes. Google’s search results aren’t that inconsistent – though, when you get to page 3 of a 6 page set, it may eliminate the pages due to duplicate results.