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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?

#81

Post by demadog »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #72
robbedpeter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gami…

Let me very slightly push back: Google can't improve their search results without changing how they approach the problem. Now, it's Google, so the odds of them changing their approach is basically zero. But, it's my belief that for instance, a review team of 50 employees whose only job is to look at common searches and the results and hunt down ... let's call it low quality links... and manually blacklist them and pa…

They already do this, they have 10,000 quality raters doing this manual work.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-eat/quality-rater...

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en

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

#82

Post by lamontcg »

Gigachad wrote: post #67
lamontcg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its not, its a reminder of when they were cool, and that button might actually work and not dump you into a morass of listicles and low effort blogspam posts.

No, I don’t ever remember the button being useful. I believe they have looked in to removing it many times but people just like the look of it. But these days the google search page has largely become irrelevant anyway.

I never said it was useful.

But it used to work as advertised and you might actually get lucky if you tried.

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

#83

Post by nhoughto »

Gigachad wrote: post #70
robbedpeter wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gami…

I don’t think it’s possible. SEO is targeted at google because that’s what the users use. If another engine became top, seo spammers would redesign around that. It’s almost similar to how GANs work. Google tries to filter crap from content and the SEO spammers try to generate crap that is indistinguishable from content. And we settled at a point where seo spammers have won and their content looks like real valuable c…

What was the tipping point where spam won the SEO arms race? Feels like SEO has been a thing for decades, cat and mouse, back and forth and the outcome for the search user has been good/decent results for most of that time, there have been big corrections against spam like Panda but generally consistent good results.. then recently bam! huge downswing in quality, spam won the war? Or Google gave up? Seems kind of unbelievable that suddenly its all gone to shit, what changed?

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

#84

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

demadog wrote: post #81
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me very slightly push back: Google can't improve their search results without changing how they approach the problem. Now, it's Google, so the odds of them changing their approach is basically zero. But, it's my belief that for instance, a review team of 50 employees whose only job is to look at common searches and the results and hunt down ... let's call it low quality links... and manually blacklist them and pa…

They already do this, they have 10,000 quality raters doing this manual work. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-eat/quality-rater... https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en

Oh, I didn't know that. Okay, then it might be unsolvable.

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

#85

Post by hulitu »

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

" 13,565 bangs and counting"

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

#86

Post by hulitu »

bhawks wrote: post #54

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…

> Google is a company that has built things which have changed the world

There are a lot of companies that have built things which have changed the world. Some of them in worse.

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

#87

Post by xigoi »

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.

And obviously, it's called “I'm Feeling Ducky”.

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

#88

Post by avnigo »

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.

Except this unfortunately doesn't work as expected and has some inconsistent behavior:

https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/sp9e5r/backslas...

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

#89

Post by fakedang »

jypepin wrote: post #52
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.

Broken on mobile too.

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

wutbrodo wrote: post #68
IncRnd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clicked the link for that and was taken to a page where I could purchase the scholarly work, "Algorithms of Oppression - How Search Engines Reinforce Racism". $28 softcover / $90 hardcover And, the credibility was gone.

Your prior on a claim that something supports white supremacy should be damn near zero in 2022.

[deleted]
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