The SEO of A to Z (not an A to Z of SEO): single letter searches 4
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:
- List the top sites that Google returns for single-letter searches.
Y is for Yahoo
- 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
- B: B&Q Online: From Kitchens & Bathrooms to Sheds & Paving; plus ... www.diy.com (presumably because when people link using B&Q, the & means the B and the Q are seen as separate).
- D: Intro - D Programming Language - Digital Mars www.digitalmars.com/d
- E: E! Online - Entertainment News, Celebrity Gossip, Celebrity News www.eonline.com
- G: Gmail: Email from Google mail.google.com
- I: Apple - Download music and more with iTunes. Play it all on iPod. www.apple.com/itunes (Do people link using i pod rather than ipod?)
- N: N - Free Action Game from AddictingGames! www.addictinggames.com/ngame.html
- O: O2 – The UK's Leading Provider of Mobile Phones, Broadband & SIM www.o2.co.uk
- P: P&O Ferries | Ferries to France | Cross Channel Ferries www.poferries.com (another example where the & seems to mean the P and O are treated as separate words?)
- Q: QTheMusic.com www.qthemusic.com
- R: The R Project for Statistical Computing www.r-project.org
- T: Mobile Phones, Internet, Email and Mobile Broadband - T-Mobile www.t-mobile.co.uk
- U: Manchester United Official Web Site www.manutd.com (People linking with Man U as the link text presumably)
- V: V Festival www.vfestival.com
- W: W. (2008/I) www.imdb.com/title/tt1175491
- Y: Yahoo! Mail: The best web-based email! mail.yahoo.com (Yahoo is often shortened to just Y).
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.
This is the personal blog of Malcolm Coles.
Wikipedia comes top in XI cases
Oh yes, I forgot to update that bit. Are you the David Brett I went to school with when I failed my Latin O-level?
That's me - I failed French and TD (both twice)!