First time I see this mentioned somewhere. YES - this exact same thing has driven me crazy.
> Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results.
I resonate with this so much. It offends me in the worst way - it makes me waste my time. Not only when I search something, but on other places too! "Will the content change before I click or not? I don't know, so I better wait a few seconds". Even if a page is not an offender of doing this, I've already been conditioned into waiting.
It's frustrating and it's infuriating. We have ever more powerful computers, and yet interfacing with them feels slower and slower.
And this is why it means so much that Google once encouraged this behavior! Because each single offender multiplies the effect and it carries through your browsing habits elsewhere.
Things like this made Google good stewards of the web.
Do Google engineers not read their own design docs anymore? It almost feels as if the move was intentionally sinister and engineered as a sadistic A/B test.
The same thing seems to happen with a lot of cookie consents that appear at the top of the page after the page loads moving the content lower. Infuriating.
People spend so much time making their pages look, work and feel better but then turn around and add a shitty, badly designed cookie consent that ruins that whole experience.
> Because of the inconsistency, I've become hesitant and scared to click anything for the first ten seconds of loading the page. I'm being habituated by negative stimulus. Nothing has ever made me want to ditch Google search more strongly because it's now literally giving me anxiety to view the search results.
I resonate with this so much. It offends me in the worst way - it makes me waste my time. Not only when I search something, but on other places too! "Will the content change before I click or not? I don't know, so I better wait a few seconds". Even if a page is not an offender of doing this, I've already been conditioned into waiting.
It's frustrating and it's infuriating. We have ever more powerful computers, and yet interfacing with them feels slower and slower.