An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

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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".

12 comments:

  1. April Fools

    http://geekideas.blogspot.com

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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. Yes, it is april fool........................

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

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  6. 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.

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

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