The Phonetic Alphabet according to Google
We have all been there; you head to Google and begin to type out your search query and up pops an autocomplete with each letter that you input. Well what we have decided to do here at Host Advice is create a comprehensive alphabet of auto completes, according to Google, letter by letter. To make the results as accurate as possible we have conducted this experiment under anonymous browsing using locally based IP’s. So the results you see may vary depending on where you are searching from, your browsing history, and any other personalized settings you have in place.
We have also broken the results down into a local comparison to show you the trends between the likes of the UK, USA, Brazil, Spain and France. What does certainly stand out, is that giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook and YouTube tend to dominate local searches, in particular Facebook, YouTube and Google who come up for their letter on each local version of search.
Is Hotmail as huge as Facebook and Google?
You will see this same pattern for Hotmail as well, under the letter H, the popular email service by Microsoft appears to be just as big as the aforementioned three. Could this be down to smaller competition for the letter H, or could they be classed as a giant? Either way, for those sites that appear more than once in a Google local search, we have labelled them as ‘Global Dominance’.
Not Every Search Follows The Same Pattern
Not every search follows this same pattern though because some local searches for a specific letter will often come back with an auto complete that starts with a completely different letter, as our infographic shows. Some examples of these can be seen with the letter W in the UK, which brings back BBC Weather, whilst the letter B brings back the French site LebonCoin.fr.
Google Autocomplete has trends
You can see that the letter J in the USA is bringing back the Wikipedia entry for the late Joan Rivers rather than Jet Blue that dominates normally that letter. However, this is something we believe that is temporal, so we replaced it with Jet Blue in the actual infographic. Google Trends search graph shows why Google Autocompleted J to John Rivers and why this is probably temporal around the date of her demise
The Most Unique Letter in the Google Alphabet is…
Whilst the likes of the letter P offers 5 different variation of autocomplete results, and so too does the letter U, we can see Q is a unique letter in the Google Alphabet. The reason for this is that not only does it contain 5 unique results but only 2 of those 5 results actually start with the letter Q. The other 3 results in Q are made up sites that do not begin with the letter Q. We have a Brazilian lottery called Quina which is housed on the Caixa.gov.br website, a similar result on the Spanish local search, and a French movie appearing on the Google.fr domain.
Forget the Phonetic Alphabet, This is The Future!
In this generation, the Internet has become such a ubiquitous source that perhaps we could use this Alphabet According to Google instead of the Phonetic alphabet. It certainly may not be as relevant, but most people will be able to quickly come up with “F for Facebook”, “G for Google” or “A for Amazon” (instead of “F for Foxtrot”, “G for Golf” and “A for Alfa”. The infographic certainly makes for some fascinating reading, and if you found the results interesting then be sure to share our infographic with your friends and work colleagues.
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