The Web 2.0 of Metaphors

After hearing that something is Wikipedia of whatever it is about, and getting slightly annoyed by it, I decided, in interest of science, to compile popularity ranking of "the X of Y" metaphors, by Google counting.

I found quite a few false positives, like "the livejournal of Nikki", and "the Linux of your choice", but upholding the glorious scientific tradition of ignoring every methodological issue that cannot be fixed, I completely disregarded them.

• "the windows of" - 15,100,000
• "the internet of" - 7,790,000
• "the apple of" - 6,470,000
• "the google of" - 3,160,000
• "the youtube of" - 766,000
• "the microsoft of" - 397,000
• "the imdb of" - 307,000
• "the craigslist of" - 303,000
• "the livejournal of" - 290,000
• "the ebay of" - 277,000
• "the amazon of" - 262,000
• "the facebook of" - 237,000
• "the myspace of" - 235,000
• "the linux of" - 197,000
• "the wikipedia of" - 180,000
• "the yahoo of" - 142,000
• "the flickr of" - 124,000
• "the ibm of" - 109,000
• "the blogspot of" - 108,000
• "the web 2.0 of" - 92,900
• "the bing of" - 90,900
• "the firefox of" - 63,200
  
• "the aol of" - 63,100
• "the napster of" - 61,200
• "the msn of" - 52,100
• "the digg of" - 23,600

It seems the most popular activity is explaining one web service as metaphor of another:

• Is Craigslist the "Napster" of the Sex Industry
• YouTube Redesign: Becoming the Google of Video?
• Is Facebook: the Google of Social Networks
• Google Earth Is the AOL of the Geoweb
• MySpace is the AOL of Social Media/Web 2.0
• YouTube.com — the Flickr of Video

There are also some unusual finds:

• The Wikipedia of Slutty Dressing
• The Craigslist of Antibiotic Resistance
• Is Python the Apple of Programming Languages?

Another interesting find is that while I've been expecting a lot of "the X of sex", only Wikipedia (36,200) and Facebook (29,500) have decent number of matches.

"The X of porn" is a lot more popular, here Google (378,000), YouTube (354,000), and surprisingly Napster (22,200) are taking the lead.

The other most popular Internet activity, spam, got almost no hits.