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I'm not so sure it is personal - I get exactly the same list, and I was just as surprised as you are at some of the entries. Sorry Rory!

Rory, my alphabet is identical to yours. Which, given that I'm sure our browsing habits are not identical, suggests that there may be some optimisation going on already... (BTW V is for Virgin)

Nothing personal here, all my recommendations were identical, which is weird, considering how much Google must know about me from 9,000 searches of mine they have stored over the years (google.com/history to be scared by how much Google knows about you.)

Hi Rory,

I get a very similar list, mine differs in the following places:

I Ikea (nope never been to their site)
Q Quidco (again.)
V Vodafone (I have been there, helping a friend find install files)
X Xe. (no idea!)

The second item in each list was as for you though.

I wonder if, as they're rolling it out they start with a generic list and then future searches will change the results of Google Instant.

I'm not sure I want to keep working through the alphabet to check...

Only differnces i = ikea, q = quidco (?), v = vodaphone, x = xe

PS what about the numbers and special characters?

for example
. = .net, 4 = 4oD, 6 = 6Music, 7 = 7Zip

some unicode characters also give an immediate result eg € = xe or ž = zivnostensky-register (in slovak?)

Endless fun for the terminally bored! Someone try Chinese, Japanese or Korean!

Lots of these are entirely new to any of our web use too.

Rory Cellan-Jones.

"..my alphabet - and I would be interested to hear how it differs from yours.."

same here, beginning to think that location must have something to do with it.

reznorsedge (#4), are you in the UK?

Rory Cellan-Jones.

this line from Maggie Shiels' last post is interesting because her results are different, she's based in California, no?

she wrote: "In a quick one-letter experiment, when I typed in the letter "A" I was offered a choice of "Amazon, AOL or Apple" on a drop-down list. For "B" I got "Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transport) and Best Buy". "C" was Craisglist and "D" it was DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles)."

@jr4412 (#7).

Yup, based in sunny Bracknell(!). The slight difference may be because I sometimes work from home and when I do that I use an American IP address as that's where my VPN server resides, so that might skew my results. In fact yesterday I was online for approx 10 hours, 3 of which were 'American' hours.

I got the same as Rory. I'm guessing this is UK defaults and the system will learn with more usage.

If you need to be logged into your googlemail account I don't think I'll be using this very much. I prefer Google SSL:

[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]

I get quite a lot of differences - but I use the French language google.co.uk (although I'm still in the UK).

Brands like Facebook and eBay are still in my alphabet though, as well as IKEA which several people have mentioned for I.

not logged in, but I got the following exceptions to your list (Google.co.uk)

i - ikea
k - klm
q - quidco
v - vodafone
x - xe

using google.com, my exception list is:
a - amazon
b - best buy
c - craigslist
d - dictionary
e -
f -
g -gmail
h -
i - ikea
j - jet blue
k - kohls
l - lowes
m - mapquest
n - netflix
o - orbitz
p - pandora
q - quotes
r - rei
s - sears
t - target
u - usps
v -
w -
x -
y - yahoo
z - zillow

When logged in, my exceptions list looks like (google.co.uk)
k - klm
v - virgin

Can I ask - why is everyone getting so hung-up about this 'alphabet' thing? Google has been trying to finish my words and sentences for as long as I can remember, with increasing accuracy as it builds up a memory of what I regularly search for. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the thing with Google Instant is not this AutoComplete (which has been around for years) but that it delivers search results, not just search-term options, before you hit enter or 'Search'. (I can't currently test it because my work computer's browser is too old and vulnerable.)

Not logged in my alphabet same as Rory except for:
i-ikea
q-quidco

The results are still fairly standard.

I did a similar look earlier this year. Here is a link to the same thing done in February this year for the UK, Germany, France, India and China.

Very little has changed in the top results and at this point, there was no customisation for different users.

Joe makes a good point. The alphabet is irrelevant - if I'm looking for 'views of newquay beach' then being presented with a result for 'vodafone' after the first letter is not going to make me stop and buy a mobile phone contract instead.

Words need context to be meaningful searches. This is a fun gimmick, but it won't change the fact that you need to give a certain amount of context to your search before it can hope to produce something relevant in most cases.

So, as you type your first few letters, results that are useless start returning. Wasting bandwidth. Not much bandwidth, but some. I wonder how much this wasted bandwidth adds up to across the country. The good news is that you can turn it off if you want. This might be a good idea if you are paying for mobile bandwidth, or heaven forbid, using dial-up.

from google.de

amazon
bild
chip
das örtliche
ebay
facebook
gmx
h&m
ikea
jappy
kino.to
leo
meinvz
netto
otto
postbank
qvc
routenplanner
svz
telefonbuch
ups
vw
wetter
xing
youtube
zdf

This is the Australian alphabet list. There are a couple of similarities to the UK list. The most interesting entry is L - Limewire. note it links to the German Limewire page.

The brackets contain my explanation of the site.

A – ATO (Australian tax office)
B – BOM (weather bureau)
C – Centrelink (gov’t dept)
D – Domain (Real Estate)
E – Ebay
F – Facebook
G – Gmail
H – Hotmail
I – Ikea
J – Jetstar
K – Kmart (department store)
L – Limewire ([Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator])
M – Maps
N – Nab (Bank)
O – Optus
P – Paypal
Q – Qantas
R – rta (NSW gov’t - road transport authority)
S – Seek (employment recruitment site)
T – Telstra
U – Utube (you tube)
V – virgin blue
W – White Pages
X – Xe (foreign currency exchange rates)
Y – Youtube
Z – Zumba (popular latin dance exercise - advertised on tele)

Does Google know more about my lifestyle than is good for it (or me, possibly)?

Amphetamines
Benzocaine
Cocaine
Dexedrine
Ecstasy
Fly Agaric
GBH
Heroin
Isobutyl Nitrate
Jellies
Ketamine
LSD
Methadone
Naphyrone
Opiates
PMA
Quat
Rohypnol
Speed
Temazepam
Uppers
Valium
XTC
Yaba
Zero Tolerance

Plastic till I die #20.

LOL nice one.

It is area specific. Google states that there is no human interference in the ranking - it is adaptive to aggregate usage. So mostly influenced by people who use the google search box as an address bar, which explains why google.com is a suggested result for G

I thought that Google was getting off-course, and now even more so. There's a pretty good article on a site I am connected with - I hope this is not breaking the rules as this article highlights that Google is not actually giving its searching users what they want -

The author demonstrates that a fairly simple search for fishing tackle produces many hits on Google, as you would expect. However, the site that Google ranks top doesn't have the phrase that was used in the search within its page - not even in the meta-data. Yet, there are sites much further down the results list that are a much better match for the search phrase. So far down though that they are unlikely to be realised.

So now, Google, so it seems, is predicting what we are searching based purely upon its own ranking system. I think this is bad news for Google users.

You are missing the most important point. As you type there are complete searches done with every new letter typed. This means there are always going to be more incorrect searches than correct ones. It is distracting to me, it is a waste of bandwidth, a waste of Google's servers time, and I can't even predict what all these wasted searches are going to do to the search algorithm. Biggest mistake since New Coke and I predict the person pushing this will be fired.

It is a shame to have not the alphabet in the right way. It should be forbidden to do so. Furthermore this kind of search on Google is not very used and not very useful as people prefer to fill in their own keywords.

If you are using Google UK then what you are seeing is auto-complete not Google Instant as it hasn't "rolled out" to the UK yet.

I really don't think that it does reflect anything personal as I'm signed in and have web search on and the results that start appearing are nothing that would interest me!