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

Small change

[Finallyjoined!!!]

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.

Re:Small change

[mastershake_phd]

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.
 
Never have, but if you type a phrase into the address bar in Firefox it does the same thing.

Re:Small change

[bahstid]

I think I use it almost all the time recently - in recent firefox versions I just type what I want in the address bar and it seems to get me where I want, or for more complex things I end up with a more usual search page. For example entering "slashdot wiki" in the address bar takes me to the wikipedia entry about slashdot but "110 million slashdot" gives me a normal, as if using the search bar result with this discussion as top link. Best feature ever.

Re:Small change

[abscissa]

I never got lucky by pushing a button. Unless "pushing a button" is used metaphorically to include phrases such as "I love you," "you are so beautiful," "just one more drink" etc.

Re:Small change

[RalphSleigh]

One can also type "wp slashdot" in the address bar to preform a wikipedia search. This is default behaviour for firefox.

Re:Small change

[alx5000]

wp... or virtually anything you want. You just have to get to any search form, right click on its input box and select "Add search keyword" (I use Spanish FF, YMMV). Then it asks you for a name, a keyword, and the folder to save the "bookmark". I have wpe for Spanish Wikipedia, urban for urbandictionary, imdb for... imdb, and so on.

Re:Small change

[Jimmy King]

Wait, there's a back button on slot machines? Damn it, I've lost so much money needlessly.

Re:Small change

[IAmGarethAdams]

Every once in a while you get lucky, and find exactly what you want, but most often you just hit the back button and feel stupid for pressing that button in the first place

Which part of "I'm feeling lucky" was it that you didn't understand?

Re:Small change

[Chris Shannon]

In Firefox 2, when you type something which isn't recognizably a URI into the location bar, it doesn't use "I'm Feeling Lucky", it uses a subtly different Google search mode called "Browse by Name".

It's easy enough to fix: just go to about:config and change the keyword.URL property from its default value,

        http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

to something like

        http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnI=&q=

which should restore the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality and get you back to normal.

Doesn't really cost them that much.

[WibbleOnMars]

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.

Re:It's a subliminal suggestion

[Slashidiot]

Well, sometimes you just feel lucky. It's fine to have a button to share it with google. Everytime I feel lucky, I go to google and press the button, I'm not searching for anything, I'm just feeling lucky.

Luckily, they don't have the "I'm feeling bored to death", otherwise i would spend too much time there.

What Jacob Nielsen said

[tie_guy_matt]

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!

Tough Job

[PinkyDead]

Marisa Mayer, Google's vice president responsible for everything on the search page "1 input box, check. 2 buttons, check. 6 links check and 1 image, check. Right, I'm off home."