I was reading quite a good article the other day, that apparently, because the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google skips all the ad placements on the SERP, that it in effect costs them $110 million per year in lost click-throughs. Their reasoning for keeping it in is as follows:

Which to me sounds perfectly reasonable! I think I would do the same. I must admit though that I've very rarely used the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Although when I type "g <my keywords>" into the Opera address bar, that often uses the I'm feeling lucky approach and takes me to the first site that it finds.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

So that's a $110M dent in exactly how much per annum? I honestly can't remember the last time I felt lucky and pressed that button, but it's always nice to have it there... waiting. :)

Billions per annum I would say! Do you think they're going to miss $110 million? Somehow I don't think so, but to the individual, it sounds like a hell of a lot of moolah. Going back on what I said originally, I'd remove it and replace it with something equally useless, but a little more attractive, like a rubber ball coded in Javascript that you can throw around the screen while thinking of what to search for. Also, put a little moolah aside from the gain of $110 million a year and reward people for the most skill!

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

Or you could take that $110 million, stick it in a bath and roll around in it naked. That seems much more fulfilling :)

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Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

That is amazing! $110M... When I had a company that could save $110M by deleting a simple button.. there was no button anymore! Heheh :)

Doesn't FireFox use "I'm feeling lucky" too? or does it do a proper search?

Both Opera and Firefox use an adaptation of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" in the sense that they will go to the first found page if they think it's relevant enough, if not they will show you the SERP.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

So, basically, FireFox and Opera are killing Google, maybe MicroSoft should take a leap out of there book and start doing it with IE too. Killing the competition by flooding with requests that don't even show their website.

Hehe. Good idea. If Google wanted though they could make it more difficult, by setting cookies and checking referrers and user agents. I don't think Google want to though, they like the fact that they have the option of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" to show that their not all about money.

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.

I like the quote on the first post more than the thread itself.

So true!

But having these browsers search using google makes it all worth it in the end.. even though opera default is yahoo.

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Hmm. Can't say I've noticed Opera defaulting to Yahoo. Unless Yahoo have recently paid off Opera

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The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.