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March 31, 2009

3-in-1 Google

Google tests a new homepage that replaces the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button with two new options that let you search using Yahoo and Live Search. "I'm Feeling Lucky" was rarely used and some people wondered if there's a connection between Google and The Pirate Bay, the popular search engine for torrents.

Google has always encouraged competition and the new options will certainly help Yahoo and Microsoft increase their market share. "We had a bug recently where we put a malware statement out for users, and in that time, Yahoo! searches gained very, very quickly. It looks like people will move very quickly from one search engine to another, for any number of reasons," explained Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

The main goal of the new features is to accelerate the innovation in search and to add variety to Google's monotonous homepage. Since the competition will be one click away, even the users who believed that Google is synonymous with web search will discover two alternative search engines.

To keep the number of words from the homepage constant, Marissa Mayer decided to remove the word "programs" from "advertising programs", a change that makes Google's homepage load 0.1415% faster in Google Chrome.


The new homepage will be slowly rolled out in the next hours to a small number of users from Santa Clara and King County. Apparently, some Yahoo engineers already found about the tests and they started to prevent the new users from going back to Google by displaying a peculiar message: "You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers".
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12 comments:

  1. MarcApril 1, 2009 at 8:32 AM

    April Fools

    http://geekideas.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. FaisalApril 1, 2009 at 8:44 AM

    is this your Aprils fool ?

    ReplyDelete
  3. macbeachApril 1, 2009 at 10:31 AM

    I'm glad they finally implemented this much needed improvement. I had been considering switching back to Yahoo search before this.

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  4. Marco MeermanApril 1, 2009 at 11:45 AM

    Haha, April fools :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. sethuramApril 1, 2009 at 2:07 PM

    Ha ha Good one Alex :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Minh NguyễnApril 1, 2009 at 4:59 PM

    If I remember correctly, Google actually used to provide links to other search engines’ results at the bottom of each result page. That would’ve been back in the beta days, before they went all profitable on us netizens.

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  7. acai berryApril 2, 2009 at 10:45 PM

    Yes, it is april fool........................

    ReplyDelete
  8. samApril 3, 2009 at 10:31 AM

    lol

    ReplyDelete
  9. UnknownApril 8, 2009 at 11:24 AM

    Please do not remove "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. IT'S A GREAT EFFICIENCY IDEA

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousApril 10, 2009 at 10:41 AM

    either you hit the 'post' button a bit too early or were REALLY excited to get your AFJ (April Foolz Joke) out before anyone else, but the date this was posted was the 31st March. Shame.

    ReplyDelete
  11. UnknownMay 3, 2009 at 6:17 PM

    :) nice one

    ReplyDelete
  12. BronchitisNovember 26, 2009 at 8:04 PM

    Google has confidence in it.So it has given the yahoo and live.com search links in its home page. Google is great.

    ReplyDelete

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