pagination - Why paginate/page break an infinitely scrolling dynamic list?

There is no shortage of pagination questions on UX.SE.

Still, something struck me recently while looking through Google's Image search: it's a dynamically-loaded, infinitely-scrollable list with (some form of) pagination, which seems like a unique case.

I mulled over a few reasons for it, but discarded them:

1. As an anchor for content: "Hey, Joe, search 'pagination' and check out page 2". This doesn't work because Google tailors search results per user, so my page 2 won't be Joe's page 2.


2. 'Page breaks' demarcate loading zones. Not the case; content is dynamically loaded between Page breaks. Even then, why would the user care?


3. To show how much you've already loaded. That's why scrollbars have dynamically-sized handles.

Why would a designer implement this? Is there a genuine advantage to the user that I'm missing?

Answer

I would say it's probably an artifact of the days before the infinite scroll. Probably there to keep from confusing older or less-tech-savvy users.

Possibly it's an engineering remnant, they already had everything broken up in some way and so it was easier to include the pagination than to remove it.

And a third possibility: The use case where a user comes, sees an image and wants to find it later, they remember they had to get to page 3 to see it.