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Google's 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button gets Playful, Artistic

Google's specialists in branding and self-promotion have done it again on the search site's iconic home page. No, it's not a new "doodle;" this time it's a tweak to the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
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  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
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Edward Moyer
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Screenshot by Edward Moyer/CNET

Google's ingenious marketing and creative departments -- the folks who tirelessly reinvent the company's logo in the form of "doodles" (and by so doing seem to have taken branding to a whole new realm) -- have produced a new and equally irresistible gimmick.

This time around, as noticed by AllThingsD's Mike Isaac, it's a change to the Google home page's iconic "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

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When you mouse-over the button, it "spins" like the display on a slot machine and stops on any one of several "I'm Feeling..." phrases, among them: I'm Feeling Doodley, I'm Feeling Stellar, I'm Feeling Puzzled, and I'm Feeling Artistic.

Click on one of the phrases, and you're served a page that has to do with a Google effort and/or product or service that's relevant to that particular phrase.

Just now, for example, I gave the button a whirl, and it stopped at "I'm Feeling Playful." When I clicked I got a page about Google's doodle for "Gumby" creator Art Clokey's 90th birthday -- complete with behind-the scenes images such as an early sketch of the doodle and some production shots of the doodle's animation being put together. A link to the Doodles home page and a link to the "Doodles on Demand" store on the Zazzle Web site rounded things out.

"I'm Feeling Trendy" brought up the "Hot Searches" page that's normally accessible through a link on the Google Trends home page. "I'm Feeling Stellar" delivered a page about the Hubble Telescope and the Crab Nebula in the Explore section of the Google Earth site. You can take the button for a spin yourself and see what else appears.

As Issac notes, the ploy is a clever Easter-eggy way to introduce the millions of people who visit Google's home page each month to the company's various offerings.

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