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The SEO of A to Z (not an A to Z of SEO): single letter searches 3

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Malcolm Coles

Rather than bookmarking Google Analytics, for some reason I type a random letter in the Google toolbar, and navigate to my Google account. Anyway, as a result I thought it would be interesting to:

  • Y is for Yahoo

    Y is for Yahoo

    List the top sites that Google returns for single-letter searches.
  • Compare the results with others who've done something similar outside the UK or a long time ago.
  • Then there are the results where Wikipedia comes first. Zzz.

Single-letter searches: Wikipedia not 1st

Results from other countries

  • Single-letter Google hits from Taint.org - Justin Mason's weblog: He used google.com back in 2006, when there was no sign of wikipedia. J was for J-Lo, L was the Council of Europe and S was for McDonald's (must be the apostrophe).
  • The A to Z of Google results from Googlefan.com: He did this in January in Australia. L was for the Latex Project (a document preparation system), O the Cirque de Soleil, and S was for Craigslist.
  • Google Alphabet from ChangeMedia: Based in the US, this site used the Google API to return up to date results, but stopped in March 2005. Again, no Wikipedia - and I was for iTools.com, nothng to do with Apple. W was for GeorgeWBush.com.
  • Search Engine Alphabet does something a bit different: It shows the first result from Google's autosuggest tool when you type in a single letter. So if you type A, it auto suggests Amazon.

Single letter searches where Wikipedia is the first result

Wikipedia comes top in X cases. Here is the text snippet for each of these:

  • A: The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /?e?/) is spelled a; the plural is aes, though this is rare.
  • C: C (programming language) - C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating ...
  • F: Fahrenheit - The Fahrenheit and Celsius scales converge at ?40 degrees (i.e. -40 °F and ... Absolute zero is -459.67 °F. The Rankine temperature scale was created to ...
  • H: Hydrogen - H2 reacts with every oxidizing element. Hydrogen can react spontaneously .... 1H is the most common hydrogen isotope with an abundance of more than 99.98%. ...
  • J: J is the tenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added. Its name in English (pronounced /?d?e?/) is spelled ...
  • K: K (and k) is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /?ke?/) is spelled kay. ...
  • L: L is the twelfth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /??l/) is spelled el or occasionally ell. ...
  • M: Metre - the symbol for metre is m. Decimal multiples such as kilometre and centimetre are indicated by adding SI prefixes to metre. ...
  • S: S is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /??s/) is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound ...
  • X: Additionally, in languages for which the Latin alphabet has been adapted only recently, x has been used for various sounds, in some cases inspired by ...
  • Z: Another English dialectal form is izzard /??z?rd/, which dates from the mid-18th century and probably derives from the French et zède "and z". ...

Next week: The SEO of 1 to 10 ...

And slightly off the subject, but here are two alphabets created from screenshots of Google Maps and screenshots of Google Earth.

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  4. Big Brother's finished: searches halve in 5 years shows Google Insights
  5. The SEO of 1 to 20

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3 Responses to “The SEO of A to Z (not an A to Z of SEO): single letter searches”

  1. David Brett says:

    Wikipedia comes top in XI cases :)

  2. David Brett says:

    That's me - I failed French and TD (both twice)!

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