The 110 Million Dollar Button

Reservoir Hill writes "The 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button on Google's search page may cost the company up to $110 million in lost ad revenue every year according to a report on American Public Media's Marketplace. Tom Chavez says that since the company makes money selling ads on its search results page, the 1% of users who use the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button never see Google's ads - the button automatically directs them to their first search result. So why does Google keep the button? Marisa Mayer, Google's vice president responsible for everything on the search page, says that 'it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money' and the 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' button reminds you that 'people here have personality.' Web usability expert Jacob Nielsen says the whimsy serves another business purpose: 'Oh we're just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time,' not you know, 'We are 16,000 people working on undermining your privacy.'"

Comments

It's a subliminal suggestion

[Thanshin]

Every time you open the page Google tell you, you're feeling lucky.

They'd add a button for "I'm feeling smart" or "I'm feeling sexy" if they found a way of justifying such a button's presence.

Re:It's a subliminal suggestion

[stivi]

Hey, actually not a bad idea. Imagine a button labeled "I am feeling bored" with a function like 'random page' on Wikipedia ... it will take you to a random page on the internet with not-so-high ranking. And for example, analyzing time you spend on that page before you return to Google to press that button again it can optimize the offer. I bet you can reach some interesting pages this way that you would not reach otherwise. There will be lots of rubbish of course, but you are bored anyway, so it should not bother you :-)

Reason?

[SharpFang]

Google easily found out that one hardly ever uses the button. They removed it. Then users began complaining, where did it go?
Users don't use it, but they simply feel happier, more secure, having it around.

Personally I'm missing the "I feel lucky" capability from Firefox search bar. Say, enter a text - a partial URL, a set of 100% sure keywords etc and press shift-enter, or shift-click the magnifying glass. Quite often I KNOW the result will be first, sometimes because I used this search before, sometimes because there's no way anything else could have beaten it. Sometimes I don't remember if the domain was com, org, us, de, net, eu, etc.

AJAX

[nmg196]

I've always thought they should add some AJAX so that you know where this button will take you before you actually click it.

eg if you type in "oxford" the button should change to say "Take me to www.ox.ac.uk"

They wouldn't look at the ad anyway

[electronerdz]

Out of all the people that use that button, they probably already knew the first search result anyway, and wouldn't have even bothered to look at the ad on the first page. If anything, it saves Google on bandwidth (not that I think they have a problem with bandwidth). I use the button when I search for things like "windows xp sp2 it professionals" because I know exactly where it goes without me having to go to an extra page (where I would have skipped right over the ads and clicked on the first link).

Googlewhack Spam

[Dynamoo]

One good reason to remove the "I'm feeling lucky" feature would be Googlewhack Spam. Spammers create a page with a unique phrase on it, and then send out spam with the special "I'm feeling lucky" URL, e.g. the URL http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&c2coff=1&safe=off&q=coelacanth+sharpener&btnG=Search&btnI= actually takes you to Dave Gorman. Spammers send out emails with the Google URL in which actually redirects to the spammer site - this helps to foil spam filters and also causes problems for spam reporting tools which misidentify the spammer as Google.

It can be pretty easy to foil, as this post on Shoemoney demonstrates.

And yes, you too can have fun in /. with Google queries for goatse.cx, tubgirl and 2girls1cup.

heh?

[someone1234]

I never click on any ads, so Google should forbid me to use its search engine?

Re:Small change

[wilx]

I do. There are certain searches, like search for PuTTY, for which I know it definitely does find what I want.