Have you ever used the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google? To be honest I have only used it about five times, ever! The concept of the feature is very smart. The button can not only make searching faster but involve less clicks. Instead of typing a long URL, one could simply type a single keyword and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. With about 100 million searches per day, how many people actually use the button? I would predict that it isn’t more than 0.5%. Why doesn’t Google just get rid of it? There seems to be a lot more to it than just that.
“If we took it away, there would be mass protests worldwide,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience. “It’s part of our heritage. It’s part of what users really like about us.”
It’s true, the term is a trademark of Google’s, it’s been around forever. And if in fact there is only 0.5% of searchers using the feature, every single one of them would be extremely angry. But there may be a benefit to Google if they strip the feature. Every time you search you see advertisements around the search results. These ads are relevent to your search and therefore you are more likely to click them. Google makes money for each click and but using “I’m Feeling Lucky” there is no results page to place ads on. It is to Google’s benefit to take away “I’m Feeling Lucky” but the concept seems to still be needed.