Google is making changes to the “I’m feeling lucky” button and turning it into a ever-changing advertisement for Google services, projects, and a few fun Easter Eggs.
If you visit the Google homepage and hover your mouse over the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, the text will spin to different emotions, such as “I’m Feeling Puzzled” or “I’m Feeling Trendy.” Clicking on the button takes you to a Google service related to that emotion. If you don’t like the “I’m Feeling…” result you get, just move your mouse away and then hover over the button again to get a new adjective.
While its usefulness is debatable, Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button has been an iconic part of Google’s bare-bones search page for years. “I’m Feeling Lucky” was designed to take you directly to the top result for your search, skipping over an entire page of blue links. A search for “Microsoft,” for example, might bring you to the company’s homepage.
But the lucky button’s days have been numbered for nearly two years. The feature was rendered pretty much useless when the company in 2010 rolled out Google Instant, an opt-out feature that delivers search results the minute you start typing in Google’s search entry box.
I gave the new “I’m Feeling…” button a spin to see what kind of results it would give me. Clicking on the “I’m Feeling Wonderful” button took me to the Google World Wonders project, which lets you tour 132 historic sites in 18 countries around the world via Street View.
You can get up close and personal with world-renowned sites such as Stonehenge in the United Kingdom, Australia’s Shark Bay, and Yosemite National Park in the U.S.
Clicking on “I’m Feeling Hungry” brings you to a page of search results for local restaurants, and “I’m Feeling Puzzled” will shoot you over to A Google a Day, a trivia game based on Google Search.
Google provides a variety of “I’m Feeling…” adjectives to uncover, including the trendy, doodley (bet you can’t guess where that will take you), artistic, stellar, and playful.
The new “I’m Feeling…” button is a great way to discover new Google services and hidden surprises that you may not know about. But fans of the old “I’m Feeling Lucky” button may be sorry to see the traditional Google feature disappear.
