Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button Becomes a Showcase for Google Properties

It’s cute, yes. But it’s also a clever way Google is showing off the various projects it has cooking. Sneaky, sneaky Google.

Example: Scrolling over the button turns up different emotions like “I’m Feeling Puzzled” or “I’m Feeling Wonderful” or “I’m Feeling Artistic.” When I clicked on “I’m Feeling Hungry,” Google immediately served up a list of nearby restaurants, complete with its recently launched Google+Local Zagat ratings service, like so:

Similarly, feeling puzzled served up the “Google a Day” site, while feeling trendy took me to a list of Google’s current hot searches page.

Now, despite my reliance on it as my one and only search engine, I haven’t visited Google.com in longer than I can remember. There’s little reason to: Many browsers have built-in Google search directly from the address bar.

But Google.com still gets massive traffic to the front door — close to 200 million monthly uniques, according to Quantcast. So even if I’m not using it, a heck of a lot of others are. Sticking a button on the front door that cycles through Google’s less prevalent properties is a smart way of trying to look quirky.

Here’s a few examples of Google sites the new button serves up:

“I’m Feeling Trendy”

“I’m Feeling Wonderful”

“I’m Feeling Doodley”