A few years back, Sergey and Larry were on NPR's Fresh Air. At one point in the interview, Terry Gross says "I tried searching for 'Google' by putting 'Google' into the search box and clicking I'm Feeling Lucky, but it didn't seem to do anything." Larry tries to explain what happened, but it seemed to go over Terry's head. At one point during the explanation I think Sergey mentioned recursion, and Terry asks "Recur-what?" To which Larry's reply was something like "Sergey is just geeking out, nevermind."
"Yah, it was a pretty interesting segment. Sergey talked about idempotence. :) The host (terry gross?) wondered why when you go to www.google.com and type in google and hit I'm Feeling Lucky, it went back to the main google page. Larry called it recursion. I could just imagine NPR listeners' heads shaking all across America. :)"
Side note: With results-as-you-type now being the default even from the Google front page, isn't "I'm feeling lucky" a totally vestigial button at this point?
Another non-cited story I've heard is an A/B test, or similar, was once done where they removed the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from the front page, and an overwhelming number of users said they did not like the solitary search button. Having both gave the users a sense of choice, even though (as the story goes), "I'm feeling lucky" is used by only a small fraction of a percent of users.
And humorously enough, the present "I'm feeling lucky" button literally cannot be pressed ... except on the initial, empty search box ... under which circumstances it leads you to ... a list old Google Doodles... Feelin' Lucky now? Guy...
this is so because we instinctively feel unbalanced when we see a single legged object rather than a two legged one. we'd feel similarly unbalanced if the two legs (the buttons) were of very different widths.
The Firefox address bar can be set jump straight to the "I'm feeling lucky" result instead of showing search results when it's confide t enough in the search.
That behavior alone, which for some reason nobody else replicates as a feature of their browser, kept me using FF for years longer than I would have otherwise. The FF address bar is still best in class in my opinion.
Haha true. I didn't think of it that way because my mind saw the homepage button and the search as you type button as "the same button" but yeah you're right. At this point (assuming you didn't disable scripts) the Google homepage needs nothing beyond an empty text field. No buttons, nothing. Weird.
I wanted to try it, but there seems to be no way to use the "im feeling lucky" button any more. Its on the home page, but as soon as I type something it dissapears.
Wow, when I read Terry's name I could immediately hear her voice. But for the life of me I can't imagine what she looks like. But for Serge & Larry, I can't imagine what they sound like at all, though I "see" their faces.
The first time I heard Steve Jobs' voice a few months ago, I was really taken aback by how much of a nerdy voice he had. Strangely, I give him a lot more respect because of it. I imagined he would be one of those sly-talking, politician-types, but it really made me amazed at how much he was able to accomplish without "the voice."
P.S. Yes, I really heard his voice only a few months ago for the first time. I never watched any keynotes or anything like that.
Instead of recursion a jump/goto can explain it better. You don't have a return on the Google page. The back button in the browser is a return but is an additional browser feature.
Interestingly, I've seen multiple non-tech persons with Bing as their default homepage (most of them having IE as browser) actually searching for "google" with Bing to search for what they wanted in the first place.
I guess it's likely that people do it the other way around.
This is ancient, it's been like this since before I joined Google, which was before Bing came out. I think back then Dogpile was #1 (??), then Yahoo, then MSN Live. Occasionally it comes up and people get a good chuckle out of it.
So honestly, shouldn't google show up as the top result for search? Does the fact that it doesn't prove that Google does, occasionally manually 'fudge' search results?
Well, why would google put itself as the top search result, when you are already on google search. And also, recently, there was some complaint (don't remember exactly who filed the complaint) about the anti-competitive movement of google when it comes to always showing google maps results when searching for locations. Anyhow, just my view of this.
Maybe not. Google is so generic that there might not be as many links to Google -- y'know, 'cuz why do you need to link to Google -- as to several of these other engines. It's not totally impossible that some other engines would have a higher ranking organically.
I remember once seeing a list of top X popular searches which included the term 'www.hotmail.com'. While I've no doubt it'd work, the level of understanding necessary to even attempt it is somewhat scary.
Um, I consider myself a native of computer-land and do this all the time. People accidentally type stuff in the wrong place. That doesn't mean they're cretins.
My father's computer uses msn.com as the homepage, which automatically grabs the focus and puts in in the search field of MSN. I'd guess that 90% of his queries on MSN are w.example.com, where the first "W"s are in the address bar where he placed his cursor, and then the actual input is queried to Bing.
OK, perhaps I misworded it, but... it wasn't that it was happening but that it was happening regularly enough to get into the top 10 queries - that strongly implies that it's deliberate.
Don't knock it, in the late 90s every search engine sucked in its own special way. Dogpile was great back then, and IIRC that's how I first encountered Google.
Yeah, there was a brief window in the mid-90's when Dogpile was definitely in the top 2. It replaced Metacrawler as my main search for a few months, as I recall.
Ahh you're bringing back memories. I was av.com (altavista) before google, and yahoo.com before that. It's easy to forget how much search engines sucked before google.
He is probably still using the first website he ever used to search the internet.
It's my experience that people who are not interested in the internet and computers learn just enough to get along and have no curiosity about new sites or techniques.
It's actually a rather smart strategy: Learn just enough to be functional. Be resistant to new information.
Though I think it was Yahoo or Lycos before that. Webcrawler possible.
Man ... back in the day ....
My introduction to AltaVista was when it was still a DEC project. It was a tour-de-force demo of the first 64-bit Unix (or was it VMS?), which allowed AV to load the entire search index into memory. Its claim to fame was speed, back before relevance mattered (now we're mostly back to speed).
A leftover from the era when searching was about "Do you have the page in your index? Can you find it at all?" and not "Which of these 10,000 results should I return first?"
Interestingly, a Dogpile.com search now returns Google as #1 (it's a sponsored result, though), and 4 more sponsored results I haven't heard of before giving Yahoo as the top composite result from Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
And the irony is, that Bing's advertising is all about how instead of 'searching', Bing is for 'deciding'. Yet they're not even on the first page for 'decide'. More SEO needed :)
Not that you may care, but posting photos of Google search result pages is now a dangerous thing and comes with a bunch of privacy concerns.
Search result pages are personalized based on your previous searches and location. Simply from the image we can tell where you live (even if it didn't say so explicitly in the left tool bar).
Oddly enough, I'm also getting google.ca as my second result and I'm in the UK. All my results are actually identical to those shown on the linked image, even when I sign out.
Pretty sure that they know about it. Just shows the google's strong position on the market - then can show bing.com as the first result and still remain the first-choice web search engine ever created.
Not sure whats up with the "feeling lucky" button as if you type something to the input box, it redirects you straight to the live search. You cannot really specify what do you want feel lucky about ;)
Google Search doesn't appear at all if I do the search on Google.no. Yahoo comes first, followed by Bing and search.com. Twitter, AOL and 4shared (a file sharing site) are all on the list, and so is "Google Insights for Search".
I wonder if this reflects the relative popularity of the alternative search engines in different countries. Google's search ranking algorithms hold many mysteries.
The interesting thing for me is that it returned a couple of Japanese results in the first page, with the characters "検索" highlighted. I've done a few Japanese searches from this computer before, which I guess is why it's giving me Japanese results, but I was surprised to see them translate search into Japanese and rank the results along with the English results.
By the way, I realized that I cannot click on "I'm felling lucky" anymore for any keyword since the google instant immediately fires up.. :(
Used to spend quite a bit of time doing that.
Yeah, I did the search, saw google.com.au first and wasn't surprised at all.
For those interested, but not interested enough to visit the AU site the results are:
1. www.google.com.au
2. www.bing.com
3. jobsearch.gov.au
4. www.dogpile.com
5. www.seek.com.au
6. www.search.com
7. www.webwombat.com.au
8. au.altavista.com
9. www.peoplesearch.com.au
10. www.search.org.au
Basically a bunch of search engines, a couple of job sites and a couple of sites with search in their name.
The point was that since Yahoo uses Bing for its search you should not expect different results from Bing (that is to say, there is not point searching 'search' on Yahoo after you did it on Bing).
As of a couple months ago when I asked this question in relation to duckduckgo.com: Yahoo's primary search page uses Bing, but yahoos API search features still use Yahoo's old system. At some point in the future Yahoo will move the api to use Bing as well. No idea if that time has come and gone.
edit: maybe I'm misrembering the details a bit. From http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/17770.htm -
"Yah, it was a pretty interesting segment. Sergey talked about idempotence. :) The host (terry gross?) wondered why when you go to www.google.com and type in google and hit I'm Feeling Lucky, it went back to the main google page. Larry called it recursion. I could just imagine NPR listeners' heads shaking all across America. :)"