Quickie: Alphabet URLs

Curiously, I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few months, then Google went and created Alphabet and it seems a bit more apropos now.  Let me ‘splain:

Go to the URL bar in your web browser (the thingy that tells you what web address you’re viewing) and type “a”.  It should auto-complete for you.  Mine recommends “amazon.com” which, I imagine, is what it probably recommends for the highest share of US web browsing people (the rest of the world may skew more towards alibaba due to sheer volume, but I’m just guessing).  Clear that out and type “b”.  I get “bestbuy.com”, which is a bit surprising because I really don’t shop there very much, but I do use it for price comparison now and again when recommending family members go look at laptops, so, legit.

You see where I’m going.  Keep going, it’s only 20-something letters, you should be able to get through it quickly; faster if you don’t write it down like I did.  Speaking of which, here’s my list:

• amazon.com
• bestbuy.com
• chase.com
• domo.com
• etrade.com
• facebook.com
• google.com/finance
• happytechnologist.com
• io9.com/10-scientific-ideas-that-scientists-wish-you-would-stop-1591309822/
• julesjacobs.github.io/2015/06/17/disqus-levenshtein-simple-and-fast.html
• kaggle.com
• louisville.craigslist.org
• mail.chiplynch.com
• news.google.com
• http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/taberinos
• pncbank.com
• qz.com
• runkeeper.com
• subaru.com
• trulia.com
• ulink.louisville.edu
• vroom.com
• wellsfargo.com
• xkcd.com/1138/ (after xx.jpeg which sounds bad and doesn’t exist.)
• youtube.com
• zillow.com

What did we learn?  Well, we learned where some of my financial accounts are, ok, maybe you don’t want to share those.  I shop at amazon, use facebook, youtube, and craigslist, that sounds reasonable.

Five letters (g,i,j,o,x) don’t go to top level sites, they go to specific pages.  X actually took me to xx.jpeg, which sounds dirty, but I’ve honestly no idea what it is because there shouldn’t be anything dirty on here and that brings up an error on my browser, so, weird.  xkcd.com/1138/ was second place.

trulia and zillow are interesting; I like real-estate.  vroom I don’t remember visiting, but I probably did months ago when buying a car, and what else starts with v?  domo is similar – they’re in my work sphere, but I don’t use the software and don’t remember visiting the site.

kaggle and runkeeper are hobbies, but there are no woodworking sites, that’s sad; happytechnologist.com and mail.chiplynch.com are my own sites.  louisville.edu is there since I’m going back to school.

Kind of interesting.  What did you find?

—Chip