Via Slashdot:
“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.’”
That “I’m feeling lucky” button is responsible to a big part of their marketing image. How much is it worth from their market cap value? Even at .5 percent (today’s market cap is about 209 billions) , you are looking at over a billion dollars.
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1% of users are using this button?
What a good joke!
I think they maintain this button because it’s part of the Google myth, in fact the amount of people using it is more than insignificant.
How much time have you find yourself the information you was looking for within the first Google result?
Rarely, exact? You need to open one result and another one, … often do a new search with a new term to finally start to find the information matching your needs.
When did you use this button for the last time?
Probably you do not even remember, … years!
And don’t come saying internet newbies are addict to this search gadget, after discover a pair of times they are not landed to the best result mathing their queries they rarely use it again.
…
There’s no luck involved, the button is just a shortcut to get to the Wikipedia page for whatever search term you enter.
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That is funny !
I rarely use it because I like to be presented with options, but I like that it’s there.