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Since Google introduced “Google Instant” back in September 2010 to help Web searchers refine their searches and find relevant results more quickly, there’s been less need for users to click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google’s home page.
With the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, users, could click and let Google provide its best guess for the information that best matched the user’s query, and most of the time, it was very effective.
Then Google introduced the Instant predictive search feature, providing cascading query answers in the results box as the user types in a search. That made search refinement even better, leaving the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to become a second thought for many users.
Now, though, Google is working to put some of the fun, surprise and real emotion back into the “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature with an inventive twist. Now when a user “hovers” the mouse pointer over the button, a multitude of other “feeling” options come up, from “I’m Feeling Trendy” to Wonderful, Puzzled, Playful, Artistic, Stellar and more, that you can choose, launching you to an unexpected and pleasing search result.
The new more emotional “I’m Feeling Lucky” button was unveiled by Google Aug. 23 in a post on Google.
“We recently added some other emotions to our I’m Feeling Lucky button, like artistic, wonderful, and of course, hungry,” the post explained. “When you hover over the I’m Feeling Lucky button, it spins to an emotion and clicking on it connects you to a page that reflects that emotion. For instance, I’m Feeling Hungry leads you to a Google results page for restaurants in your area. Bon appetit!”
If you click on those other options, Google Search will take you to one of Google’s many online properties where relevant search results will match the inquiry.
So if you click “I Am Stellar,” Google might take you to Google Earth, where you might get information on the Hubble Space Telescope.
If you click “I’m Feeling Artistic,” Google might take you to the Google Art Project collection, where you can be amazed by the spectacular painting, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” by painter Georges Seurat, which is on display at The Art Institute of Chicago.
Does the “I’m Feeling Puzzled” option appear? There, Google might take you to the Google a Day site, where you can answer up to 10 questions a day in an engaging online search game.
Did you get the “I Am Hungry” option? There Google might take you to a local restaurants search page.
Yes, the new feature is perhaps a bit silly, but they can also be quite entertaining and enjoyable.
The beauty of search with the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and its new counterparts is-with apologies to “Forrest Gump”-like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
When it was introduced almost two years ago, Google Instant was lauded as a way to help users refine their searches as they sought to find the answers they were seeking. By essentially “guessing” what the user was searching for as a query is typed into the Google Search box, it made it faster-letter by letter-to answer queries.
That capability brought that kind of “I’m Feeling Lucky” capability to the Google Search box, leaving the Lucky button as an also-ran ever since.
With the added new “emotions” in the Lucky button, users can again find some fun and wonder as they explore the new capabilities.
Though Microsoft’s search engine usage in the United States increased slightly by 0.01 percent since June, Google still dominates Web search with 66.8 percent of the U.S. market, according to the latest July 2012 figures from Web analytics firm ComScore.
The July rankings continued to be led in the United States by Google, with Microsoft’s Bing capturing 15.7 percent of users and Yahoo sites capturing 13 percent of users. They are trailed by Ask Network sites capturing 3.1 percent of users and AOL with 1.5 percent of the market, according to the figures. The numbers are for what ComScore calls explicit core searches, or those that exclude slide shows and contextual links in text.