Be honest; it's so you can keep handing out those "I'm feeling lucky" shirts.

Interesting post. Now, to calculate the actual costs you also need to take into account the number of people who'd switch to, say, Yahoo, being so disappointed that Google removed the "Feeling Lucky" button. Everything has an effect on making money -- even making money. For a more clear example, let's say Google would start showing a banner ad on their homepage from now on. Google would make loads of extra money, but many people might also use Google less, or start blacklisting the ads on Google via their ad blocker, and so on.

PS: Marissa is quoted to have said it's "less than 1%" that click on the Feeling Lucky button. Which could be anything, even 0.01%, which would make the follow-up calculation of 110 million bucks off too.

Don't think that's realistic? Well, consider this: Google News on their help page say they aggregate "more than 4,500 English-language news sources". I once wrote a crawler accessing their indexed sources over time, and I found ~10,000 sources using this way alone! "More than 4,500"... yeah, technically very true.

ValleyWag/blogOsphere fuzzy math strikes again!

This appears wildly wrong. $100,000,000 would be about 1% of Google's total annual revenues, and those are not related to clicks like this. First, you have to look at how many of those who clicked away *would have clicked on a paid link* rather than an organic result. Google does not make money on impressions, rather on ad clicks. Second, Google makes about 60% of revenues from Google clicks and 40% from adsense - so even if they lost 1% of all the home page revenue (which they do NOT for reason above), the number would be $60,000,000. Philip's points are also valid above.

Loss to Google? Probably *well* under $10,000,000 which is chump change for them.

@joeduck: I'm sure Tom Chavez simply took the revenues Google earns from its search marketing and multiplied it by .01. That would account for both of your objections, no?

@ Joe. Surprisingly the number of people clicking the adds cannot be much different from people searching. I read some where more than 60% cannot distinguish real results from ad placements. Still you have a point there adios.

Marissa Mayer explained, "It's possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what's delightful about 'I'm Feeling Lucky' is that it reminds you there are real people here,"

Translation: "Removing the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button is something we're holding back for when we need to keep revenues growing to keep our stock price up"

Oddly, there's no "I'm feeling horny" button at Booble.com.

Man $110 Million? We know there are real people working there, how about they hook that button up again and share some of the wealth eh?

Who visits the Google homepage?!! Google toolbar has been my companion for many years - and I frequently hit the little shamrock on there - but now I mainly use the Firefox/Flock context search extension ([www.cusser.net]), so every search engine is just a right click away (including the Google Lucky search)