How does Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button work?

Before you tire out your brain too much, I should tell you that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is ridiculously simple: it takes you to the #1 match for the given search term or keyword. That's all. No randomization, no selection of one of the first ten, just the #1 match.

For example, let's say I searched on "diamond watch, mens" on Google (you can too: search). The results clearly show that the top match is the shopping comparison site Nextag:

Now, go to the Google home page and again type in "diamond watch, mens", but this time, instead of clicking on "Search", click on "I'm Feeling Lucky".

Ahhhhh... now you know the secret!

To add an "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature to your own site is straightforward, albeit a bit tricky since Google makes it hard to read their Web pages because there's so much going on behind the scenes. In a nutshell, though, here's their home page search box:

We can simplify it a bit, but it turns out that if you just remove the "Google Search" button and only have "I'm Feeling Lucky", you get exactly the functionality you seek:

Here's how it looks in action:

It's not too complicated, really. You can change the label on the button by changing what's specified in the value= field, as you desire, and if you'd like to have the result show up on a new page, rather than replacing the current page, add target="_blank to the form tag as an attribute.