Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Not so lucky any more?

The Google home page has seen some changes of late. One of these is the removal of the "I'm feeling lucky" button.

One of the things I've noticed over the past few months is that searching online has become dramatically worse. Google is increasingly failing to find useful results, and when it does find something it will rather present you with multiple instances of the same thing (the same news article syndicated to different sources, for example) rather than the more useful list of independent answers. Commonly I end up going to subsequent search pages, and often don't get to anything useful at all.

Is Google losing its touch? Has dumb search had its day? Perhaps the "feeling lucky" option was removed because it almost never works any more.

3 comments:

Peter said...

I see the "I"m feeling lucky" button right now in the USA. Perhaps it was removed from the UK?

Cam said...

Same with Australia. Though I do agree the quality of the results is coming down but perhaps that's a function of the algorithms not keeping up with the ever growing size of the web crawl. Identical cross-postings to various mailing lists and forums is very annoying though.

Graham said...

I'm still seeing it in the .co.uk version. Maybe you've installed a Firefox add-on such as "Customise Google", which can remove/alter some of the search page furnishings?

If it really had gone I would have proffered the suggestion that it was removed due to abuse, such as the infamous "I'm feeling lucky" search for "French Military Victories" - that one still works!