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.'"
Small change (Score:5, Insightful)
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, Insightful)
Re:Small change (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Small change (Score:5, Funny)
Which part of "I'm feeling lucky" was it that you didn't understand?
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Right click on the field between the word Search and the Go button on the left side, and "Add a keyword for this search".
name it wikipedia, keyword w, create in bookmarks.
Replace "wikipedia giraffe" by "w giraffe"
There are some search fields that will not work with it. Like DNSStuff.
But what saves you a few keystrokes is always good.
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Tightening is the opposite of loosening, not loosing. I would think reigning in would be a more appropriate antonym for loosing.
I have counted four posts already in this thread with lose misspelled. If the supposedly more intelligent people that read slashdot are making this kind of error, how long will it be before loose is considered an appropriate alternate spelling of lose?
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.
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For me, it doesn't do the "I'm Feeling Lucky" response. It does the same thing as typing a phrase into www.google.com and then clicking Search. As in, it provides me with a long list of results.
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Small change (Score:5, Informative)
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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'.
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It seems like a win-win decision to me - I don't ever have to look at stupid "p
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It can be a definite timesaver if one knows that the first search result is the desired one (or at least a result that is relevant to one's needs).
Re:Small change (Score:5, Funny)
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And increasingly so... It's one of the significant issues with Google having so much dominance. From 1997 til 2001 or so the I'm Feeling Lucky button was a useful and fun tool. These days it pretty much fails more often that not in my experience. Since Google is the number one search engine and, as far as I can see, there's been little advance in search sin
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Works pretty well as a "get me to this page I was at the other day but can't remember the URL of, but can remember a few prominent words from" button.
Or.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quiet, taxpayer.
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That's silly. (Score:3, Insightful)
RTFS (Score:3, Informative)
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.'"
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Lottery! (Score:1, Funny)
$40 Million Dollar Logo (Score:5, Funny)
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It's a subliminal suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Luckily, they don't have the "I'm feeling bored to death", otherwise i would spend too much time there.
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Re:It's a subliminal suggestion (Score:5, Informative)
Reason? (Score:3, Interesting)
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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Doesn't really cost them that much. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Your statement is equivalent to saying that site owners should pay Google a search tax when they find a site.
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I somewhat doubt they would do that. IIRC google has always been very hot on maintaining the seperation between search results and advertising. If people found the i'm feeling lucky result was different from the top search result because google were being paid do so I think it would be pretty bad PR.
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Anyway, I'm not sure of the purpose for this press release anyway. Are we supposed to feel a twinge of sadness over money that Google didn't make? One wonders whether some companies will settle for less than control of all the wealth in the world.
What ever happened to "doing a good job, being financially successful" being good enough? Now success in business only seems to be measured by "total world domination" and "endless growth".
AJAX (Score:5, Interesting)
eg if you type in "oxford" the button should change to say "Take me to www.ox.ac.uk"
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http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en [google.com]
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You mean performing actual analysis of your search input every every time you type "f", "o", "r", "d"?
Plenty of interfaces do this. It's likely they wait for a short pause between letters, just to save totally irrelevant searches.
... and you can do it in Ajax too. For example the gardening site Grows On You has a field for the botanical name of the plant you're writing about. It uses Ajax to populate a drop-down list as you type -- this is based on a fairly standard Ruby o
For example, I use the Flock browser. If you type into the search bar, it updates a drop-down list with results from Yahoo as you type.
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You make that sound like a stupid idea.
Google already do FAR more complicated things. Try planning a route in maps.google.com and then dragging the suggested route line. Google recalculates a suitable route several times a second and updates the map with the new route in real-time as you're dragging the marker. That's FAR harder than what I was suggesting. My idea wouldn't be much harder to implement than Google Suggest. Especially as most of the results can be cached.
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Re:AJAX (Score:4, Funny)
110 million ?? (Score:1)
So they're counting the entire bandwidth of the people clicking that button would naturally click all the ads ?
The article quotes Marissa as loosing revenue to tune of less than 1% ??
0.001, 0.0001 ?? what ?
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The button is branding. Would this same analyst consider any advertising Google might choose to do as a "revenue loss"?
The assumption is exactly as absurd as the assumption that every downloaded song is a lost CD sale, for exactly the same reasons.
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see... (Score:4, Funny)
And my capcha was confide, spooky...
They wouldn't look at the ad anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
It's branding. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Who actually uses that button? (Score:2)
It's that little snippet of text in the search result that shows you the context of your search term- that's what really helps my searching. Now that I think about, I wish I could set that blurb to be longer...
And please.
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You are not lucky.
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But sometimes you know what the top result is, you just can't remember the URL exactly. So it's more like a searching through your bookmarks; if you already have Google as your start page it takes no longer. Eg: I want to go to the home page of Adobe, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Slashdot, the "lucky" button takes me there with just one word. For slightly less mnemonic sites too: "new york times". Obviou
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I use it when I need to grab PuTTY, I just type in:
putty download <tab> <tab> <enter>
check the URL (I remember that it looks omething like chiark.green--something-something.uk), and I am good to go.
It's Marissa (Score:2)
They're feeling lucky. (Score:1)
So lucky they can even afford to loose those big 110...
french military victories (Score:3, Funny)
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Needs more risk (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Googlewhack Spam (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be pretty easy to foil, as this post [shoemoney.com] on Shoemoney demonstrates.
And yes, you too can have fun in /. with Google queries for goatse.cx, tubgirl and 2girls1cup.
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
heh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not as expensive as (Score:2)
People use it?! I'm shocked! (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone, quick, call Jakob Nielsen! We need an exhaustive study!
usa-what? (Score:2, Insightful)
How long (Score:3, Insightful)
The 'maximize profit at the expense of everything including customer experience' really gets to me sometimes.
What Jacob Nielsen said (Score:5, Funny)
Time to put on the tin foil hat -- I am on to you now google! You just made my list!
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Wait until you see Phase Two [theonion.com].
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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!
In case you're not just joking and it really didn't occur to you: What would happen if Google removed the I'm Feeling Lucky button? That's right: "Hey, look, guys! Google truly has become a heartless corporation, losing their old 'quirky' charm."
In other words, the point isn't paranoid at all.
solution! (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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(And I clear out Flash cookies, too)
Firefox Location Bar (Score:2)
Sponsored link revenue imprint revenue? (Score:2)
What does Google earn when a sponsored link is used? If the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button drives some searches to the sponsored links, does this make up for the revenue lost by not showing a search results page with individual ads? Maybe the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button encourages advertisers to buy sponsored links, making up for the lost ad revenue from the search results page.
Just some thoughts...
Tough Job (Score:5, Funny)
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I got to know! (Score:2)
I know what you're thinking. Did he get a pagerank of six or only five? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being as this is Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, and would find a needle in a haystack, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya punk?
(With apologies, and lost karma.)
Keeps me from going to typo sites (Score:2)
I mostly use the address bar to type in URLs. But if the URL is too long (where I might mis-type) or I'm not certain of the spelling, I use Google with the "I'm feeling lucky" button. It gets me the right URL every time.
Simple example:
I type "discovercrd.com" - I get a typo site.
I type "discover" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky" - I get the home page for discovercard.com.
it's an asset, not a liability (Score:2)
How many users use Google *because* of the I'm Feeling Lucky button? How many users would Google lose if it removed the button?
My view is that this button differentiates Google from much of the competition and attracts a good number of users who otherwise would use another engine.
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Er, yes, because this is not the main Google page for your country. It's a subpage. Wow, http://www.google.nl/maps [google.nl] doesn't have an "I'm Feeling Lucky" either. Oh noes!
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