Who Owns The Alphabet? (2004)

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Just in time for the end of the year, I’ve updated Who Owns The Alphabet?, my yearly survey of the battle for domination of the very components of expression.

Basically, it records who’s top of the Google search for each single letter. Starting this year, I’m also documenting the top suggestion from Google Suggest for each letter.

6 thoughts on “Who Owns The Alphabet? (2004)”

  1. You will need to make a small adjustment to your list:

    The website http://www.coe.int belongs to the Council of Europe, but you’re wrong saying that this is the same as the European Union.

    The COE has 46 member states the more important and more famous European Union has 25.

    The COE is an intergovernmental organisation mainly concerned with human rights and democracy. It’s members are all party to the European Treaty on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. For example, they have all banned the death penalty. Even Russia is a party to the COE.

    The EU is the one with the enlargement from 15 to 25 members on may 1st this year. This is also the organisation where Turkey wants to get in (they are a member of the COE already). The EU is about the Euro, the internal market, the new constitution for Europe, the economy, the European Court of Justice, the European Commission, anti-trust, agriculture, etc… (Oh, and the software patents…!!)

    Oh, and if you still want to keep the french translation in your list: just replace ‘union europ�enne’ with ‘conseil d’Europe’ ;-)

  2. Micha�l: Thanks very much; I’ve updated it with your description. But that means I have absolutely no idea why it’s won the “L” category…

  3. Council of Europe is probably the first result for “L” because its name in French is “Conseil de l’Europe”. I figured this out by guessing and then changing “EN” to “FR” in the URL for the main page of coe.int.

  5. Just wanted to point out that using a similar method (though with single numbers in place of single letters), Firefox is 1, and Netscape is 4 and 7. To use (very, very–but purposefully so) grossly distorted logic, 30% of the Internet belongs to Gecko!