Feeling lucky? Count down to 2010

If you go to Google and click “I’m feeling lucky” without typing anything in the search box you’ll see a number counting down by seconds.  It was a mystery number until I did the math.  Here’s what I did.

I used Excel to divide that number by 60 to turn it into minutes and then by 60 again to turn it into hours. I divided that number by 24 to turn it into days (and fraction of a day).  Then I used Excel’s time & date function to calculate the exact time (“now”) and added that to the number.  Sure enough, the result was 1/1/2010 00:00.

It’s no longer a mystery.  It’s the number of seconds until 2010.

The results of clicking "I'm feeling lucky" around 6:07 PM (PT) on Dec 14th
The results of clicking "I'm feeling lucky" around 6:07 PM (PT) on Dec 14th

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