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I’m feeling lucky and your appendix works
By susan | April 8, 2008
Does anyone still use the I’m Feeling Lucky button on Google? I remember trying that a couple of times in the dark ages of the Internet. When internet still began with a capital I. The first time I ever saw Google. I suppose it must have been 1998.
The results of clicking on I’m Feeling Lucky were amusing at best and haphazard at most. For one thing, not much was out there or available to find. Even if it delivered the best possible results for your search, the answer was fundamentally: it’s not here yet. Not on the web. Nothing was very well sorted. And google was not yet a verb. It was more of a game just to see what would show up.
In the interim as both Google and the web became quite useful, I was not clicking but using the Enter button. Type a search and hit enter. Rinse and repeat. The I’m Feeling Lucky button was the appendix of Google for me. It had not been removed from the body but had no discernible use. I did not see it anymore.
As it turns out, your appendix may have a use after all. In one of my favorite ways of gleaning new scientific information - through the viewing of network television dramas with decent writing and research, I heard that tidbit on Eli Stone. Oh my, I was trying to give you an ABC official site link to Eli Stone but the page took forever* and when it finally loaded a commercial for LOST began playing. They lost me on that one, so the link above is for IMDB’s listing of same. You can visit the ABC site if you want.
According to a conversation between Jonny Lee Miller who plays the lead character, and Matt Letscher who plays his brother, the appendix aids in digestion. I believed it because writers don’t make that stuff up. That’s the kind of information that a writer stumbles across and finds fascinating and later uses in a story. More to the point, it’s too easy for anyone to check the facts on the web. So I believed it. But okay I will check and confirm, as follows.
I googled these words: “appendix purpose aids digestion” and there you have it. Several links came up confirming what they said on the show, that it appears as if your appendix may have useful bacteria that aids in digestion. If you select Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky button on that search, it will take you here to a useful article.
It also makes sense! To me, the story that the appendix is useful is far more believable than the old story that you didn’t need it and doctors could just remove it anytime. I’ve also been watching the John Adams series over at HBO and being reminded how doctors used to remove blood from people in hopes that it might make them feel better.
I started out to tell you a story about how I tried the I’m Feeling Lucky button again today. Realizing that a lot of things have changed in the last ten years, and Google is a better Google, and the web is a better web. So if you type in ‘imdb’ plus a partial name of a film, and click on the Lucky button, it will take you right to that page on IMDB.com. The result was exactly what I wanted to see.
It reminded me of how long distrust can stay in a customer’s mind, for so many years, and how little it might take to get them to trust you again. If only you could get them to click on that Lucky button that they tried so long ago and did not work. Because things may be improving all the time; but without a little proof of that, your customers are not necessarily going to stick around or revisit the same place twice.
So I may develop a new habit. When I’m feeling confident about Google’s ability to deliver results, I could hit Tab twice and then Enter. Most likely this will be in combination with an already trusted site; for example, in this case that would be IMDB and not ABC.
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* (regarding the use of the word “forever,” if it feels like forever to your customer, then that’s exactly what it is — even if it was only sixty seconds)
Topics: customer experience, google, trends, web services |