"I'm Feeling Lucky"

February 24, 2022 12:39 PM

The button has an obfuscating function that places it within a long list of techniques for evoking autonomy within control: all manner of “placebo buttons”; the layout of a theme park or department store; complicated privacy settings where users are overwhelmingly likely to choose the default. It reifies autonomy itself, turning it into an external commodity. This strategy, part of the blueprint for digital capitalism, is today writ large in massively popular games and gaming platforms — from Pokémon GO to Roblox — which allow a user the freedom to roam within a world of the game’s making, while siphoning off their labor. from Search Party: Why does Google still have that “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?
posted by chavenet (39 comments total)

I haven't looked at the google home page (or, if you prefer, "hompy") for so long, that I was skeptical that this even still is there. It's not on mobile! But it is on desktop. Great.
posted by aubilenon at 12:59 PM on February 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Clicking that was a lot more fun when it felt like Google had your best interests at least somewhere adjacent to something resembling a heart.
posted by mhoye at 1:03 PM on February 24, 2022 [28 favorites]

They should re-label the button: "I'm doing my own research."
posted by straight at 1:16 PM on February 24, 2022 [28 favorites]

I have never once clicked that button. I never feel lucky.
posted by bondcliff at 1:31 PM on February 24, 2022 [24 favorites]

Thank you for pressing "I'm feeling lucky!"
Your belief that the advertising algorithms we use allow for any element of luck is a useful data point in the psychological attack surface profile we keep on you.
We appreciate your assistance.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 1:34 PM on February 24, 2022 [20 favorites]

I've always wondered what that button does! I doubt many people see it now as they have been trained to use the address bar to search.

Nowadays you can think of Google Assistant/Siri/Alexa searches as the equivalent of "I'm feeling lucky".
posted by meowzilla at 1:38 PM on February 24, 2022 [11 favorites]

My default approach to online interfaces is to immediately look for the "advanced" button. I'm never feeling lucky. But, this is interesting.
posted by eotvos at 1:44 PM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Story inspired primarily by the chance to use the word aleatory, Y/N?
posted by tavella at 1:57 PM on February 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

We've only just passed peak feeling lucky. Well, per google anyway.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:06 PM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

I still like sites that have real random internal link searches, such as SparkFun Electronics and Wikipedia. They're from a gentler time.
posted by scruss at 2:06 PM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

I guessed that it was the equivalent of Wikipedia's "random article" link before now? (Using that actual link, I got the article on the Hepburn-Grant movie Holiday, which ain't so bad.) And, I gotta say, TFA's statement of "As Google’s first personal utterance, “I’m Feeling Lucky” was the company’s version of the Biblical “I Am Who I Am”: a declaration of omnipotence" sure is gassy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:10 PM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

scruss: "I still like sites that have real random internal link searches"

Ahem.
posted by chavenet at 2:47 PM on February 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

Thank you for pressing "I'm feeling lucky!"
Your belief that the advertising algorithms we use allow for any element of luck is a useful data point in the psychological attack surface profile we keep on you.
We appreciate your assistance.

(Read in the voice of GLaDOS)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:49 PM on February 24, 2022 [12 favorites]

I have never once clicked that button. I never feel lucky.

I feel lucky that I have never once clicked that button.
posted by hangashore at 4:38 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that purple prose about declaring omnipotence is silly. I think this is the main thing:

“a startling bid of confidence that implied that, unlike the competition, Google was capable of nailing your request on the first try.”

Before Google, there was AltaVista, which sent your search query to a dozen different search engines and returned all the results in the hope that one of them might have found what you're looking for. Then Google came along and the most obvious differences were 1) a shockingly clean interface that wasn't covered in banner ads and links to all kinds of other services they were trying to sell and 2) it worked.
posted by straight at 4:41 PM on February 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

I remembered that wrong. AltaVista was not an aggregator. It was one of the first search engines powerful enough to be comparably useful to human-compiled indexes like Yahoo!. I think there were later aggregators that included AltaVista with other indexes and search engines, but then Google came along and made all of that mess and clutter seem unnecessary.
posted by straight at 4:51 PM on February 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Bah. "I'm Feeling Lucky" is the current model & the entire future of Google Search: only one answer to every question. They have gotten better at guessing obvious questions, and now mostly ignore complex questions.

Back in olden times (several years ago) Google was much better at answering questions with several potential branches. But now for example, you're kinda screwed if looking up someone with the same first-last name as "generic-current-star-heartthrob-?" Google will hate you for asking that question. (Yes, there is a "subtract" function, but I'm finding that it actually doesn't quite work now).
posted by ovvl at 5:57 PM on February 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

Are you feeling lucky is only appropriate when Clint Eastwood is pointing a huge gun at you.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:11 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

I’m just frustrated that Bing, despite consuming endless billions of Microsoft’s money, is still so bad.
posted by rockindata at 6:29 PM on February 24, 2022 [7 favorites]

I really wonder whether Google is setting the stage for a Premium Search functionality. That would sharply reduce the value of ads on the free service if it ever got real traction though, so I suppose they’d have to believe it would be very successful — but if they could somehow maintain at least a pretense of anonymity yet let advertisers know what you were searching for in order to approach you somewhere else . . .

And they could (continue to, IMO) let potential advertisers influence your search results even though they weren’t showing you the ads with the search.
posted by jamjam at 6:31 PM on February 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Microsoft really needs to stop trying to make Bing happen. I'd rather have Chandler Bing himself come up with a list of search results than ever have to use Bing again.
posted by winterportage at 7:32 PM on February 24, 2022 [8 favorites]

AltaVista was the first search engine that fully indexed all of the web pages in its index (launched 1995); it was built as a demonstration of the sorts of powerful applications you could build on Digital's computers at the time. Up until then I think Yahoo would have been where you went (and a quick Google search tells me that was Jan 1994).

Google's insight was twofold, in 1998: 1.) using link information provided more information about whether sites were trustworthy, and should be used as part of the search engine signal, and 2.) it was possible to use commodity computers to do what Digital had done. It's not clear to me which was more important in terms of Google's early dominance of search, but those were both critical (1 helped them have much better search quality early on, and 2 meant they could scale much more cheaply.) It wasn't until a couple of years in when they figured out how to do targeted ads that it became the money-making machine it was, but those 2 factors were the early competitive advantage.

I don't think the aggregating search engines really showed up until at least late 2000/early 2001. Though that may be because I just started paying attention to search in late 2000.

I am also surprised that Microsoft never managed to make Bing any good. It looked to me like they had the resources to do something decent.
posted by grae at 9:42 PM on February 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

You can get the Altavista user experience today just by using most website's internal search function. Just a load of garbage pages that happen to match the keyword, with no attempt to put the one you probably wanted first. You could wade through pages and pages of results and not be able to find something you know probably exists. Try searching "walkman" on sony.com to see what I mean.

Google was magic in the way it put good results first. People switched immediately because it was the first search engine that actually worked. The I'm Feeling Lucky button is a flex on that - no other search engine had any chance of putting the result you really wanted first.

Most searches on Google these days are a different kind of garbage, because so many webpages are designed solely to be read by GoogleBot and not to convey useful information to humans. You can't build a better web search engine if the information users are looking for isn't being put on the web anymore.
posted by grahamparks at 1:41 AM on February 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Google was magic in the way it put good results first. People switched immediately because it was the first search engine that actually worked.

I remember thinking of the newly released Google as thoroughly refreshing because it was the only search page with just a logo, a box and a button (okay, two buttons) instead of layer upon layer upon layer of superfluous crap ladled all over it.

Google was clean and did exactly and only what was requested of it. And doesn't that seem a long time ago now. Sigh.
posted by flabdablet at 7:43 AM on February 25, 2022 [8 favorites]

I’m just frustrated that Bing, despite consuming endless billions of Microsoft’s money, is still so bad.

DuckDuckGo, which I believe is mostly Bing in the back end, has been my default search engine for about a year now and it's usually plenty good enough. But when I can't find what I was expecting to then I'll do a Google search instead, and Google's results almost always show evidence of being based on more thoroughly conducted crawling.

In particular, Google is much better at digging out my old AskMe answers than DuckDuckGo.
posted by flabdablet at 7:50 AM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

flabdablet: "DuckDuckGo, which I believe is mostly Bing in the back end, has been my default search engine for about a year now and it's usually plenty good enough. "

Milkshake DuckDuckGo
posted by chavenet at 8:32 AM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

> Milkshake DuckDuckGo

Goddamn it. I mostly use search engines for crap like finding out what hours the pizza place down the street is open, because the Web is a bland SEO-covered mess compared to 15 years ago, so Duck Duck Go is good enough... but I guess I should switch back to Google.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:37 AM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've sadly given up on Duck Duck Go. I love the idea. But, the only way it's actually useful now is if you use it to jump to some other search engine. The results are garbage. (I assume Bing is similar.) That it's gotten worse, rather than better, over the last decade, seems weird. Maybe the shit websites have gotten smarter at tricking search engines.
posted by eotvos at 9:19 AM on February 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

Ugh. I was just yesterday being pissed at Google and thinking maybe I should switch to DuckDuckGo. Apparently not. Why can't we have nice things?
posted by quiet wanderer at 9:26 AM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

When I rolled the mouse over it switched to "I'm Feeling Stellar", which is kinda cool. I recall using it occasionally when I pretty much knew where it'd send me, but that is kinda dating myself ;-)
posted by sammyo at 9:31 AM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Milkshake DuckDuckGo

Whatever. I give less than no shits which search engines Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro prefer; their opinion on that, as on everything else, is almost certainly worthless and therefore best ignored entirely.

DDG works well enough for me most of the time, and it doesn't nag me to sign in, and the less completely trivial I can make it for Google to get a good read on me the happier I am.
posted by flabdablet at 10:53 AM on February 25, 2022 [7 favorites]

Story inspired primarily by the chance to use the word aleatory, Y/N?

A teacher once told me that EA Poe wrote "The Bells" because he wanted to use to the word "tintinnabulation."

It made perfect sense to me.
posted by Well I never at 3:12 PM on February 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

I remember an early interview with the Google founders where the interviewer said, “So explain this to me. I went to your main search page, and I typed ‘google’ in the search box, and I clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky,’ and then nothing happened. Wait. Oh! Wait. I just figured it out.” The tech answer was a definition of “idempotent.”
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:18 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I have on good authority that if you type Google into Google you can break the internet
posted by Mitheral at 5:15 PM on February 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

You can't build a better web search engine if the information users are looking for isn't being put on the web anymore.

I think we might be returning to a time when curated lists of websites and pages might be useful again. Ideally in a format with many people looking at submitted links and individually deciding yes and no on each of them. That'd require a lot of person-power, but maybe if it focused on sites more than pages, then letting people do their own searches within the site? I dunno, maybe I'm still too old-web in my thinking.

Milkshake DuckDuckGo

I think it should be mentioned that DuckDuckGo says in that article that they're looking into ways to limit the spread of misinformation.
posted by JHarris at 2:59 AM on February 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe the shit websites have gotten smarter at tricking search engines.

That's Google's problem, SEO started successfully gaming their results a decade ago and it's only been getting worse. A generic query for how to do some tech-related thing will sometimes have a full page of dumb how-to-do-it site results before getting to something useful. It used to be that Google seemed to prioritize blogs and interesting individual pages on them, but now it seems to mostly return sites that try to explain everything but badly.
posted by JHarris at 3:01 AM on February 26, 2022 [4 favorites]

It used to be that Google seemed to prioritize blogs and interesting individual pages on them, but now it seems to mostly return sites that try to explain everything but badly.

The weird ones that I see a lot are sites that come back with exactly the search terms/phrase I entered in Google. It’s as if the sites read the search query, then delay a response nanoseconds long enough to insert that query back into the return, making it a valid search item.

Like, I’ll search for “grape jelly stroganoff” into Google, and the top returns are stuff like:

Best Grape Jelly Stroganoff Term Paper!
Date Horny Grape Jelly Stroganoff in Your Area!
Top Grape Jelly Stroganoff Apps!
posted by Thorzdad at 6:23 AM on February 26, 2022 [8 favorites]

As with all things, reports are that they did an A/B test and that users were less happy using search without the button, even though the users didn't click the button. Google keeps the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button because it measurably has a positive effect on their user satisfaction metrics.
posted by pmb at 2:24 AM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

I kind of want to see a source on that. Who reported it?
posted by JHarris at 3:36 PM on February 27, 2022 [1 favorite]