I use the search engine, Google daily and almost every time I entered the homepage I would wonder what is this “I am feeling lucky” button, so I decided to find out!
The “I’m feeling lucky” button eliminates the search of every website with the possible keyword that you type in and sends you directly to the number one site in their database. It is a user friendly button that decreases advertisements that sometimes get in the way of your search.
The button costs Google $110 million per year and yet less than 1% of their users take advantage of it. So is this beneficial? Google does not receive any capital from advertisement using this button, so it is clearly an expense, but it is beneficial because it keeps some users coming back. If it were not there some users might switch to Yahoo, Ask.com, or any of the other competing search engines.
Google has been the number one search engine for the past three years, and maybe one of the reasons is they keep things like “I’m feeling lucky” that help the user but are not necessarily the most profitable applications.
We are a different class of college students every Spring. Together we explore what it means to do business in a "Web 2.0" world. Technology, new businesses, cutting-edge trends, we cover them all! 
