a jaundiced eye: Champeon's Law of Vowels

a jaundiced eye: saner heads
for tuesday, july 22, 1997.

Champeon's Law of Vowels

I've decided that Yahoo!'s success at gaining mindshare is entirely due to what I would call Champeon's Law of Vowels. It can't be because of their lightning response to new site submissions, or their intelligent categorization of content, as many have pointed out, nor is it really a matter of being in bed with the right companies, as the aforementioned Red Herring article points out.

Nope. It's because it has lots of vowels in its name.

Take a look at the early contenders.

(name) (total
letters
in name) (#
vowels
in name) (#
consonants
in name) (%)

GNN+ 3 0 3 0%

WWWW+ 4 0 4 0%

Lycos 5 1(2)* 4(3)* 20(40)%

Webcrawler 10 3 7 30%

HotBot 6 2 4 33%

Altavista 9 4 5 44%

Aliweb 6 3 3 50%

Excite 6 3 3 50%

InfoSeek 8 4 4 50%

Yahoo 5 3(4)* 2(1)* 60(80)%

* "Y" is used as a vowel in "Lycos", but not in "Yahoo".

+ Anyone who wants to take the time to count the number of vowels found in "The World Wide Web Worm" and "Global Network Navigator" should feel free to do so, and email the results to me, for science.

I think this analysis speaks for itself. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to work. But first, a prediction: ZZZ Search will survive, and even come to dominate the Estonian Search Engine market.

http://www.zzz.ee/otsi/

Steven Champeon

r e c i p r o c a t e

Permanently archived at: http://www.jaundicedeye.com/browse/saner_heads/072297/