Who Owns the Alphabet?
November 2002
(These results are historical; see the most recent results.)
Companies strive for brand-name recognition, and adopt common phrases ("Where do you want to go today?") and even single words ("True") as being representative of that company, and no other. However, sometimes a word or phrase can be used by two very different companies, perhaps in different product spaces, who then have to fight it out for mind-share.
This page takes that to its logical limit, and asks: in the space of human awareness, who has won the battle for the basic building blocks, the very letters that make up the words with which we express ourselves? Who does the Internet's collective consciousness associate most closely with each of our 26 alphabet atoms?
As with so many things, Google has the answer. Googling for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet produces the following results:
| First Hit | Description | Comment | Honourable Mentions (top 10) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | YourDictionary.com | Comprehensive index of online dictionaries with 800 dictionaries in more than 160 different languages. | An appropriate start. One of only two winners where the letter isn't in the company name (see also X.) | Apple, Adobe Acrobat Reader, A List Apart |
| B | B'Tselem | The Israeli Information Center for human rights in the Occupied Territories. | The only political site in the set of 26 (I count W as a PR site :-). | Belgian Railways (b-rail), Oral-B, agnès b |
| C | CNET.com | Technology product reviews, news, jobs and downloads. | CNET dominates this category, with 8 of the top 10 links. | C-SPAN.org, c't |
| D | D-Link | Manufacturer of hubs, switches, NICs, Ethernet. | D-Lib Magazine, Banca d'Italia | |
| E | E Online | Entertainment news, celebrity gossip, games and community. | eBay, E*TRADE, MSN Hotmail (e-mail) | |
| F | F-Secure | Product information, news, support, and information on viruses. | (Top 10) A (dis)honourable mention for over-use of the F word... | F***edCompany.com, F.Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Home Page |
| G | The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation | Dedicated to education and research about causes, treatment and the search for a cure. | (Top 10) That's a great name for a search engine. It's just that men will never find anything with it. | G-SPOT Philippine Search Page |
| H | H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online | Interdisciplinary organization dedicated to developing the educational potential of the Internet. | Tip for an up-and-coming .com - pick a name beginning with H. There's a market gap. | National 4-H Council, Harley-Davidson |
| I | Disney Online | Official site including online activities, news, information, shopping, and contests. | Apparently, Disney owns I due to the large number of porn site EULAs with an "I disagree" link leading to disney.com! | iVillage.com, iWon, ICQ.com, I, Cringely |
| J | triple j | Australia's Youth Radio Network. | Does this prove you can do better on Google if you write a search term into your page more than once? :-) | JCrew, J. Paul Getty Museum |
| K | The K Desktop Environment | KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. | ...and it rocks. | Kmart.com, K-Meleon |
| L | LEXPRESS.fr | Selection d'articles et de dossiers de l'hebdomadaire français. | The French have a strong presence in this category, for l'obvious reasons. | L'Oreal |
| M | 3M | Technologies include abrasives, adhesives, non-woven fibers, films. | No sign of Microsoft or MSN... | M&M's, M-Systems |
| N | SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer | A searchable database of outstanding Internet learning sites. | Netscape.com is nowhere to be seen here, although they own the letter X... | n-tv.de, *NSYNC |
| O | O'Reilly and Associates | Technical and computer book documentation for Linux and other Open Source software. | A side effect of Google's algorithm using ' as a word separator. | Drew's Script-O-Rama,O'Reilly Network |
| P | Alfred P. Sloan Foundation | A philanthropic nonprofit institution established in 1934 by Alfred Pritchard Sloan, CEO of GM. | P. Diddy | |
| Q | Q4music.com | Music news, commentary and reviews, with online music shopping. | B&Q | |
| R | The R Project for Statistical Computing | R, also known as `GNU S', is a free system for statistical computation and graphics. | (Top 10) It's ironic that a company whose symbol is an I should get an hon. ment. only for the (R) mark they use on it so consistently. | Intel(R) Corporation, Toys"R"Us Inc. |
| S | GNU's Not Unix! | The founding organization of free software. Home of the GNU Public License. | A strange category. According to the highlighting, the GNU Project appear to own S based on the s in "GNU's Not Unix". | Hoover's Online, The HTML Writers Guild, McDonald's |
| T | AT&T Home Page - Welcome! | Provides long-distance, international and wireless services as well as Internet access. | (Top 10) Blogger gets an honourable mention - T for Tons of Tiresome Twaddle, presumably ;-) | BLOGGER, T-Online, c't, Ain't It Cool News |
| U | The whatUseek Network | A meta-search engine with directory from the ODP. | I suppose this shows that misspelling your company name can pay off. | U-Haul, uboat.net, US Senate |
| V | Bobby WorldWide | HTML accessibility checker. | Don't ask me. "Validation", perhaps? | V-Day (anti-violence), Channel [V], V.90 Modem Standard |
| W | Welcome to the White House | Official site - features a virtual historical tour, and the history of the American presidents. | We all know the reason why this site wins W - and it isn't "Welcome" or "White" :-) | Form W-4, Michael W. Smith |
| X | Netscape.com | Portal, search engine, providers of the Netscape browser. | Perhaps this is a commentary on the sort of things people search for on Netscape.com... | PayPal, THE X - FILES, Mac OS X, X.Org, XFree86 |
| Y | Yahoo! | The first large scale directory of the Internet. | Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization, 92nd Street Y | |
| Z | HealthAtoZ.com | Medical and healthcare resources for patients. | No ZDNet... | ZNet, Dragon Ball Z |
Note: much to the chagrin of those who try to manipulate the index, Google changes its search algorithm frequently, and so for this and other reasons, the results listed here may not be the same as those you get if you do the search for yourself. This page may be updated on an irregular basis, but I'm not promising anything.