Links from half a decade ago are irrelevant here. The claim that pagination only benefits advertisers is ironic, given we are discussing a Google page.

The point of pagination in this case is to reduce the client-side processing load and up-front bandwidth consumption to view the page. This isn't a news article. It's a set of nontrivial binary files being downloaded and rendered using javascript.

The OP of this thread complained that infinite scrolling plus lazy loading put his browser under heavy load. The first respondent accused him of wanting everything loading up front. I merely suggest a middle ground.

My only complaint with infinite scrolling is that it breaks the scroll bar. It looks like Google accounted for that here by pre-rendering placeholders so the scroll bar doesn't keep resizing and jumping around. (But this wouldn't work so well if they had, say, 10,000 fonts.) Waiting for dynamic content to fill in the placeholders is no worse than waiting for a new page to load.

I just wish we had a standard "lever" widget to replace the scroll bar in lazily loaded pages - similar to the middle-click scrolling on at least some systems that have middle mouse buttons.