Do you feel lucky punk... well, do ya?
Sitting down tonight, while watching some Monday Night Football with the family, I got a little bored of the Saints beating Atlanta and decided to boot-up a web browser to search for random things online. I use www.google.com as my default homepage and simply started typing in the first two letters of a word with the autofill automatically pulling up suggested sites on the fly. This isn't news, this is a cool technology implemented on their front page for the past several months. However, for some reason tonight, I was curious: if I simply typed in one alphanumeric character into the search bar, what site would be first on the list? So... After clearing my cache and confirming within two separate browsers, the alphanumeric characters pulled up the following websites:
Alphabet
- a - www.amazon.com
- b - www.bestbuy.com
- c - www.craigslist.com
- d - dictionary.reference.com
- e - www.ebay.com
- f - www.facebook.com
- g - mail.google.com/mail
- h - www.hotmail.com
- i - www.imdb.com
- j - www.jcpenney.com
- k - www.kmart.com
- l - www.lowes.com
- m - www.mapquest.com
- n - www.netflix.com
- o - www.overstock.com
- p - www.pandora.com
- q - www.brainyquote.com (not a mistake - quote is what kicked this one up)
- r - www.rpi.edu
- s - www.sefcu.com
- t - www.target.com
- u - www.ups.com
- v - www.verizonwireless.com
- w - www.weather.com
- x - www.xbox.com
- y - www.yahoo.com
- z - www.zappos.com
Numbers
- 1 - wbab.com
- 2 - www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=2011
- 3 - www.nbc.com/30-rock
- 4 - www.4chan.org
- 5 - www.foxsearchlight.com/500daysofsummer
- 6 - www.677prime.com
- 7 - www.7-zip.org
- 8 - www.wgy.com
- 9 - www.latino963.com
- 0 - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)
For those who want to partake in looking at this themselves, I did the search on December 27, 2010, between 9:30PM and 10:00PM. The search was completed in Scotia, New York 12302 on Road Runner's network. I used a Mac using OSX's 10.5.8, Safari 5 and Firefox 3.
I'm curious what alphanumeric characters pull up for people. Some sites are definitely localized due to Google's complex advertising/search engine; it maybe obvious which ones are, however, it would be a cool to confirm!