I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.

A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.

But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.

I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.