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:
- 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.
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)!