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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.'"
Has anyone here ever used the "I'm feeling lucky" button. I think I did once in 1999. Usually it's the second or third result that's the most relevant.
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They know that the first result is pretty unlikely to be what you want, so you'll have to come back and do a real search anyway...
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Have they accounted for the image benefit of the "I'm feeling lucky" button? Would Google have as many users for normal searches if that button were not there? Accounting will make everything look bad if you tell them to.
I bet their logo is too rainbow colored too, must offend homophobes into using a more straight looking site like yahoo. I bet they're losing at least $40 million as a result.
MABASPLOOM!
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.
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.
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Nah, it doesn't cost them anything like that. That's probably what it would cost if every one of those "feeling lucky" people had instead clicked on an ad, but let's be honest here, that would never have happened.
Those people who use it are
(a) people who already know that the result they want is the first one and wouldn't click anything else anyway.
(b) people doing silly google-hacks, like "miserable failure", or whatever.
(c) people who will come back any use google's regular search anyway for more results once they've seen the "lucky" one.
For all these people, using the "feeling lucky" button isn't stopping them clicking on any ads, because they wouldn't click them anyway. In fact, it is actually likely to be adding to their brand awareness of google, and thus making them more likely to come back to google for other searches where they might click on ads.
So yes, it might lose them a *few* ad clicks on the *actual* search involved, but long term, those people will be back and will click on other ads. Google isn't losing anything from this.
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"
And my capcha was confide, spooky...
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).
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The phrase "I'm feeling lucky" is part of the Google brand, as has been since their search engine was incepted.
Notice the phrase is also prominent (and useful!) in Picasa.
The point is, losing it would be a big change to the brand, like making Coke cans with no red on them.
The calculation is probably pretty simple: 1% of people click that button results in 1% of 10 billion US$ revenue. This assumes only that almost all the 10 billion revenue is made with search ads (which is not true), but otherwise is a fair assumption. -Bernd
How can you forget the french military victories in "I'm Feeling Lucky" ?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It's not really a huge gamble that the first result will be relevant. "I feel a vague sense of mild positivity" is probably more appropriate.
In order to generate a real, winner-takes-all atmosphere of living on the edge, an element of risk should be introduced. For instance, a 60% chance of going to the first search result, a 30% chance of going to tubgirl, a 9% chance of having your identity stolen and a 1% chance of having bomb-making instructions downloaded to your machine and a tip-off email sent to the relevant authorities.
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.
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I never click on any ads, so Google should forbid me to use its search engine?
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Maybe it's because I'm a control freak or because I'm a pessimist or something else, but I've never used the Lucky Button. I'd love to see a psychological profile of the people who use the Lucky Button regularly.
Someone, quick, call Jakob Nielsen! We need an exhaustive study!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Ahhh Jakob, lol. Web usability evangelist is more like it. "I'm feeling lucky" (as some have mentioned) is sometimes actually a pretty nice shortcut, it's also a fun way to spend an evening. I never would have discovered there was a band called "Johnny Uterus and the Philopean Tubes" without it.
until moneygrubbing investors pressure Google into ditching the button?
The 'maximize profit at the expense of everything including customer experience' really gets to me sometimes.
Hold on a minute. So is he saying that they put the "I'm feeling lucky" feature in just so we don't notice that google is really "16,000 people working on undermining your privacy?" So they make us think they are "just two kind of grad students hanging out and having a beer and having a grand old time" so we don't notice that the true purpose of google is to undermine our privacy?
Time to put on the tin foil hat -- I am on to you now google! You just made my list!
Next they'll replace it with "I'm feeling gullible" and make sure it only ever links through to a page that already contains Google ads ;o)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Undermining my privacy? The only information Google is able to get abut me is what I do online -- and not much of that. I wipe cookies once in a while, and that's the only reliable way they have to track me on other sites. Take off the tinfoil hat, Nielsen.
Of course, to throw them off the scent, I randomly view Oprah's website, NASCAR videos, and horse porn once in a while.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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There are "open redirectors" on many major sites, including Google, AOL, eBay, and Microsoft Live. (Yahoo plugged their hole by giving their open redirector its own, easily blockable, domain.) We mentioned this on Slashdot a few days ago, and someone immediately followed up by using the Google exploit to get through Slashdot's filters.
These open redirectors are regularly exploited by phishing scams. People report them to PhishTank, and over at SiteTruth, we tie them back to the domain responsible and fix blame. PhishTank is too nice about this. They just blacklist the phishing URL. That stopped working a few months back, when phishers started generating random URLs and subdomains for each e-mail. We down-rate the whole base domain.
It's time to take a hard line on this. The Internet used to tolerate open mail relays, which were a nice feature until spammers started exploiting them. Now they're routinely blocked. Open redirectors now need similar treatment.
Beyond simple URL redirectors are exploits of JavaScript redirectors. Efforts are underway to detect and block those.