thoughtcrumbs

Recursive googling

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in Google takes you to the first search result, saving the intrepid person an extra click. Sergey Brin admitted that he'd like to remove the button, the overly-optimistic contribution of a college student confident of his software's accuracy. But it's one of the elements contributing to the search engine's quirky charm, so it's there to stay. In her interview with the founders of Google, Terry Gross asked Brin and Larry Page how often they googled themselves, and they replied with the expected nerdy modesty. She then described what happened when she googled Google. A regular search returned the usual results, but an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for Google returned, so she thought, nothing. Over and over again she just got a blank search box. Had our favorite engine lost its steam? Nope, Google was just returning the best result for that search, itself.