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Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

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Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#51

Post by vincentmarle »

penneyd wrote: post #18

Who else went to Google and hit that button for the first time in a decade :)

I did, but it’s surprisingly hard to use. The first thing you need to do is get to Google’s homepage in the first place (haven’t been there in ages as well) and then once you start typing, the auto-suggest moves the buttons around. You have to mentally prepare yourself to not hit enter and press on the Feeling Lucky button instead.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#52

Post by jypepin »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #10

This mostly seems to funnel people to various Google things. Hover over it and you might get… - I'm Feeling Doodley: Google search for "google doodles" - I'm Feeling Puzzled: redirect to http://www.agoogleaday.com/#date=2012-02-29 - I'm Feeling Trendy: redirect to https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily?geo=... - I'm Feeling Artistic: redirect to https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/xwE7rgYgnWm68w…

Funny, I tried it and ended up on http://www.agoogleaday.com/. The site looks broken because clicking on the only button "start playing" does not work.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#53

Post by RC_ITR »

jackconsidine wrote: post #31

> In 2007, Marissa Mayer, then a Google exec, shared that only one percent of Google searches went through the button; internal analysis further estimated that “I’m Feeling Lucky” cost the company more than $100 million in revenue per year because it skipped over ad-filled search pages These numbers don't add up....

Classic set-up:

PM: About 0.2% of searches

Exec: So basically 1%

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#54

Post by bhawks »

The only substance I can extract from this article is that the author really dislikes Google. If there is any other signal it's buried in the noise of the preachy and verbose writing style. At least the links to $90 books don't include an affiliate tracker :).

Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world (whether this tends to the good / bad / neutral will take a much longer time to sus out - and it'll certainly vary on the perspective of the person looking back). Any undertaking that results in the impact the size that Google has would find itself in a very similar space.

(I am an xoogler fwiw)

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#55

Post by robbedpeter »

nhoughto wrote: post #28
xanaxagoras wrote: post #16

It's like the last little bit of personality Google has left.

Yeah if they removed it there would definitely be commentary about how theyve changed. Plus there must be a whole team that managed that functionality, what would they do then? Help fix the search results maybe..

I've recently begun thinking that Google can't, in fact, improve their search results. They've forced the algorithmic landscape of available data onto a local optima because of seo and financial incentives. The only way they could improve results would be the cooperation of all players - website owners would have to agree to not try to game the algorithm, which will never happen. Everything is so oriented around gaming the Google algorithms that the game is deadlocked.

There's a clear opportunity right now for an awesome search engine to usurp Google's throne. Bing and Microsoft are too conservative to be a serious threat, but would happily acquire an engine better then Google. Nobody wants to be David on purpose when Goliath is a terrifyingly huge and scary as Google, but I think it's gonna happen soon.

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#57

Post by henriquez »

brailsafe wrote: post #38
johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #34

Please use Bing or DuckDuckGo. If you are on HN you already know that both of them are orders of magnitude better than Google. It's Google's monopoly and anti-competitiveness deter Bing and DDG from gaining more momentum. We should all use Bing or DDG.

It would be nice if it were true, but neither are better. Yes, both perhaps have less pernicious ad tracking and placement, but they just don't feel as effective

DuckDuckGo seems to have equivalent or better results for non coding-related queries

Bing has the best results for porn

Google still wins for coding stuff though. Other than that it’s a cesspit of irrelevant keyword ads and SEO spam

Re: Why does Google still have the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?

#58

Post by freedomben »

jrmann100 wrote: post #20
tentacleuno wrote: post #13

DuckDuckGo still has this, but it's not in the form of a button. Instead, if you prepend a backwards slash (\) to your query, it'll take you to the first webpage in the list of results. This is done server-side, so it also works in your browser's search bar.

DuckDuckGo's !bangs[0] deserve a mention as well, where you can use an exclamation point with an (abbreviated) site name to forward your query to the site's internal search (try !hn). (Using a plain ! anywhere in your query seems to do the same thing as \) 0: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Can you still implement bangs and submit them? Would love to do that.

Edit: Yes! https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

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