The Google Alphabet
Start typing something into google, and the now established “autocomplete” or live suggestions or whatever it’s called today pops up. I thought I’d take a look at the Zeitgeist, and see what each letter brings (and the #2 result in brackets). All pretty big-brand, although the second most common search beginning with an “r” is “reverse phone lookup”? Seems like an unanswered mega-site right there.
UPDATE: Since posting this, it’s been pointed out to me that there are only 2 humans in the list (Tiger Woods and Lady Gaga, good going!), although they are both second placers. Have a look at Mark and Darren’s excellent BLN blog to see versions from other countries.
UPDATE2: Added some numbers and characters – and notice that Google Ads now appear in the autocomplete (try typing in 000 (i.e. three zeros) into the google.com homepage…
- amazon (aol)
- best buy (bank of america)
- craigslist (cnn)
- dictionary (disney channel)
- ebay (espn)
- facebook (facebook login)
- gmail (google maps)
- hotmail (hulu)
- imdb (itunes)
- jcpenney (jet blue)
- kohls (kmart)
- lowes (lady gaga)
- myspace (mapquest)
- netflix (nfl.com)
- office depot (opm)
- pandora (photobucket)
- qvc (quotes)
- realtor.com (reverse phone lookup)
- southwest airlines (sears)
- target (tiger woods)
- usps (ups)
- verizon wireless (victoria secret)
- walmart (weather)
- xbox 360 (xm radio)
- youtube (yahoo)
- zillow (zappos)
So what about numbers?
- 12 days of christmas (123 greetings)
- 2010 calendar (2012)
- 30 rock (3 lyrics)
- 4chan (411)
- 500 days of summer (50 cent)
- 60 minutes (6abc)
- 7zip (7deadly sins)
- 80′s music (80′s fashion)
- 90210 (92.3)
- 0 balance transfer (007)
And I guess I should do the other common characters too…
- .net framework (.net framework 3.5)
- @properties (@live.com)
-   (&hearts)
- ¬_¬ (¬ alt code)
- ?, !, “, $, %, *, ), (, ~, # etc – nothing…
Interesting stuff, reminds me of an article I read a while back by Nate Lanxon @ cnet called “What does Google Suggest suggest about the state of humanity?” http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49304156,00.htm Quite an amusing and depressing read! BG
Alex,
Love it. Surprised how little this has been done before although there seems to be some evidence that people have had a look over the years. It made me wonder what this would look like for Google.co.uk so I did the same exercise. Seems we are obsessed with shopping, the weather and escaping from it. Social media – not so much. You can see the top three results for Google.co.uk here: http://thebln.com/2010/02/brits-obsessed-with-shopping-weather-the-google-alphabet-uk-version/
I linked to your post but didn’t want to steal traffic so haven’t put the two lists together side-by-side. Feel free to do so or perhaps we should put them both up on both blogs?
I wonder why these names come up? I assume that they are not about natural search and that some of these organisations are paying to appear.
Mark,
Great post on your blog – happy to combine/add/etc!
At first I assumed that Google did it on a pure frequency basis, but you might be right, there may well be more to the algorithm than that. Would be interesting to see the trends too.
Cool..it has changed some since we posted a similar observation http://blog.pint.com/2009/06/30/google-abcs/ last summer
It would seem logical to do this daily or weekly and see how it evolves over time, might give some insight into trends.
And I thought I was a sad kid sitting in front of Newsnight typing the alphabet into Google China, India etc last night. Mr Kelleher, you have surpassed me with your thoughts of symbols.
You can see the results for France, Germany, UK, China and India on this post. http://thebln.com/2010/02/around-the-world-with-google-autocomplete-google-knows-what-the-world-is-looking-for/
What seems quite astonishing to me anyway is how few global superbrands there are. It seems that only Google, Yahoo and Facebook appear as likely number one choice across all countries. There also seems to be a fair amount of differences between the kind of information people look at across countries. India seems to be strangely obsessed by cricket, the Brits by shopping and the weather.
Love all of these lists, but my favorite is definitely still “What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google” http://bit.ly/7JBTQs by @danariely Professor Behavioral Economics at Duke University
@Mark Littlewood
Yes, it it quite time-consuming… But you seem to have even translated the chinese characters, so I can’t live up to that…
Have you noticed the google ad results now in the autocomplete? (try typing in 000 (i.e. three zeros) into google.com…