Search This

I love perusing decorating sites. It’s always fun to collect inspiration photos to add to my collection. So off to a well known decorating site I go. Today I was looking for ideas for a kid’s room, preferably something nautical. I typed my search criteria (Nautical Bedroom) into their handy Search field:

And here are my results:

Huh? I’m on a decorating site! Why did I just get a ‘No recipes found’ message?! Once I look back at my original search I realized that the default search option is for the Recipe section only. This seems so odd to me on a decorating site.

My recommendation:
Make sure your default settings match what your user would expect them to be. I am hard pressed to believe that the vast majority of searches on this site are for recipes as opposed to decorating or some other topic. Or, for a site like this that has many topics, search the whole site, then allow the user to filter based on the topics that might be of interest to them.

Funny thing…As I was preparing this post I went back to the site to check something out and lo and behold, they have updated their Search. The whole Recipes/Site paradigm is gone and the default is now to search the entire site. Maybe they got an advanced copy of my post! 🙂

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Do You Feel Lucky?

I have developed a strange fascination with the Google ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button.

Google is my home page when I go to the web. I use Google Search all the time and have for years. And I can honestly say that I have never used this button.

So, what exactly is this button? Who uses it? What’s in it for Google? And from a UX perspective, is it a positive or negative thing?

According to Google the purpose of the ‘I‘m Feeling Lucky’ button is that it takes you directly to the first webpage that returns for your query (aka the most relevant/first ranked result). When you click this button, you won’t see the other search results at all. An “I’m Feeling Lucky” search means you spend less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them.

This works out all well and good if I am confident that the first search result is actually the page I want to go to. But if I know what the most relevant search result is and that this is in fact where I want to go, I’d assume I know this because I’ve seen the search results at some point before. Wouldn’t I have bookmarked the page? Or maybe even already know the url?

Oh, and for the record, just because something was the first search result last week, or maybe even yesterday, doesn’t guarantee that it will be today. A perfect (and hilarious) example of this is the Google-Facebook fiasco from February.

I wonder how many of these folks used the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ that day? 🙂

So…we know what the purpose of the button is, who uses it?

In a November 2007 interview Public Radio interview (Are you feeling lucky? Google is), Marisa Mayer, Google vice president, guestimated, ‘less than 1 percent of our searches are done through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” route.’

I guess so much for the 80-20 rule.

With only 1% of all searches using this button I’m surprised that Google has stuck with it for so long. And why does it make sense for Google to give the button the same billing as a straight search? They must be getting something out of it! But what?

Tom Chaves, the head of Rapt, a company that helps determine what advertising real estate on a web page is worth (from the same 2007 interview) states, ‘Basically you have $110 million of revenue loss per year associated with that button. That’s because the company makes a lot of its money by selling ads on its search results page. People who are “feeling lucky” never see that page, and therefore Google’s ads, because the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button automatically directs them to a non-Google site.’

It must not be for the money. What then? According to Mayer, ‘it’s possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the “I’m Feeling Lucky,” is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people.’

Really? Is that the reason??

Does the button convey a sense of ‘real people’ or ‘whimsy’? Do people even have a clue what this button does? Or does it simply open up the possibility of leading the user down a path where they may do something they didn’t want to do? And possibly add extra steps to reaching their end goal?

I ‘m undecided…I’d love some insight from folks that have used the button. Have you ever used the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button? Did you love it or hate it?

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