Google liberates ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ Button on India Independence Day

Along with that wonderful artwork, there is another change Google has served up on India’s Independence Day. Have you ever noticed the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on the Google home/search page? Chances are you’ve never used it, seeing Google themselves admit that the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button is used in less than 1% of the searches.

In case you wonder what that button was about, it used to act in two different ways depending on whether the ‘search box’ is empty or not. If empty, clicking on the button would take you to the Google Doodle archive. When a search term is entered, the button’s action is to take you straight to the top ranked website, bypassing the Google search results.

Now, instead of retiring that button, Google has freed the I’m Feeling Lucky button by adding options to it. Hovering over the button randomly offers 8 new options. The options vary from ‘feeling hungry’ to ‘feeling trendy’.

Here are the 8 new options:

• I’m Feeling Artistic: Takes you to a random Google Art Project.
• I’m Feeling Doodly: Takes you to a random Google Doodle.
• I’m Feeling Hungry: Takes you to search results for restaurants.
• I’m Feeling Playful: Takes you to a (random) interactive Google Doodle.
• I’m Feeling Puzzled: Takes you to a Google-a-Day site.
• I’m Feeling Stellar: Takes you to a random Google Earth/ Space views.
• I’m Feeling Trendy: Takes you to Google Trends- Hot Trends.
• I’m Feeling Wonderful: Takes you to a random World Wonders page at Google Cultural Institute.

The results themselves seems to be random, except for the ‘Playful’ which always leads us to the Pac-Man interactive Doodle. Here are the ‘codes’ from 2 instances of the webpage.



BTW, the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button has been freed only if you access Google.com page and not if you use

• India - Google.co.in or,
• Canada - Google.ca or,
• UK - Google.co.uk or,
• Australia - Google.com.au, or from any other country.

Clicking on the button (with an empty search box) in all these websites doesn’t do anything at all - the button is deactivated takes us to the Google.com homepage where we get to see the upgraded/freed I’m lucky button (this includes the Hong Kong site too) - Updated (17 Aug 2012)

PS:- The old I’m feeling button seems to be still active with Google Hong Kong at Google.com.hk (Your last chance to see how the button worked till now).
:-)

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