| Friday, August 05, 2005 |
| elgooG |
This is fantastic! It's a Google mirror. Type 'elgooG' into Google and click on the first link (or hit 'I'm feeling lucky', which takes you straight to the first result.)
Apparently, so this website says, it's common practice for busy websites to create a mirror site, which is an exact replica of the original site but on a different server. This way if one server is really busy, you can go to the other server.
But elgooG, instead of creating a mirror site that is an exact replica of the original site, it's a mirror image of the Google site.
Incidentally, I've always been intrigued by the 'I'm feeling lucky' button on Google. It encourages us to trust Google so much that we think it might get us where we want to be with the first result for our search term. But what if the first result is a flashy page that loads really slowly, or is something completely different to what was needed? Surely it makes more sense every time to at least spend the 0.2 seconds that Gtakes to search and then a brief glance to decide at least from the first few results which one looks most useful?
One time that it might make some sense is when you've used a search in the past and you know that the site you want comes top. But surely you would know the website address and even if you didn't , what if the results had changed since you last searched?
Working on a web development team, I'm fascinated that Google have given such prominence a function like this. I'm also intrigued to see that they've turned the emphasis from their competence to the users luck. A user of the site would be excused for thinking that the button really did depend on chance. A more appropriate description for what the button actually does would be something like 'Google is feeling confident', or 'I trust Google'.
A few random thoughts on google. Feel free to comment! |
posted by Mike & Helen @ 7:15 PM   |
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