The 110 Million Dollar Button 191
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.'"
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
Never have, but if you type a phrase into the address bar in Firefox it does the same thing.
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
Re:110 million ?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:AJAX (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en [google.com]
Re:It's a subliminal suggestion (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
RTFS (Score:3, Informative)
Privacy? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Small change (Score:3, Informative)
Not here it's not (Windows XP, Firefox 2.0.0.9, both installed fresh about 2 weeks ago). It just goes to Google search for 'wp slashdot'.
Re:RTFS (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, come on... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
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= [google.com]
to something like
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnI=&q= [google.com]
which should restore the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality and get you back to normal.
That's just one of many "open redirectors" (Score:3, Informative)
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, [slashdot.org] 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 [phishtank.com], and over at SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], 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. [lehigh.edu] Efforts are underway to detect and block those.