A Is for Amazon, B Is for Best Buy…

Google’s search suggestions for the letter “Q.”

Back in the olden days, the sign that a corporation had hit the big time was when it got a single-letter stock symbol on the New York Stock Exchange. For example, Ford has “F,” AT&T has “T” (for telephone), Citigroup has “C” and U.S. Steel has X (not sure why, but it always has).

On the Web, there’s another way a single letter can enhance a company’s prestige. Go to Google’s home page or browser toolbar and type a single letter into the search box. The search engine will then drop down a list of suggestions, based on overall search activity (you have to have “show suggestions” checked for this to happen in your toolbar). There are 26 sites that have the distinction of being the first suggestion for each letter of the alphabet.

Who are these titans of the Internet era?

A - Amazon

B - Best Buy

C - Craigslist

D - Dictionary.com

E - eBay

F - Facebook

G - Gmail

H - Hotmail [Still? Huh.]

I - IMDB

J - J.C. Penney

K - Kohl’s

L - Lowe’s

M - MySpace

N - Netflix

O - Office Depot

P - Pandora [But way to go, Party City, for nabbing the No. 2 spot.]

Q - QVC [The No. 3 spot is "Quotes about life." Nothing specific, just, you know, life.]

R - Realtor.com

S - Southwest Airlines

T - Target

U - USPS (for United States Postal Service)

V - Verizon Wireless

W - Wal-Mart

X - Xbox 360

Y - YouTube

Z - Zillow

Cross-referencing Google’s list with the top suggestions from Microsoft’s Bing search engine yields some interesting discrepancies. On Bing, A is for AOL, B is for Bing (which is either brilliantly meta, or kind of silly), G is for Google (ouch!), I is for IRS.gov, O is for Orbitz, P is for the gaming site Pogo, U is for “UTube” (which redirects you to YouTube), W is for www.google.com (ouch again!), X is for XM Radio, and Y is for Yahoo.

All of Google’s top suggestions for a single letter are sites and companies. No individuals have yet achieved such search stature, although two come close: Lady Gaga and Tiger Woods are Google’s second suggestion for “L” and “T,” respectively. With the publicity they’re both getting, they might crack the list just yet.