I was just thinking that Torontonians expend a great deal of energy worrying about living in a world-class city, yet we never seem to make much world-class progress up the world-class ladder. In these early years of the 21st century, Google, in a world-class of its own, is still the most reliable and impartial judge of all things world-classy, so I thought I’d see just where we rank. A simple search for “world class city” shows these world-class cities ranked ahead of us:
- Los Angeles, California
- Columbus, Ohio
- Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
- Delhi, India
- Geneva, Switzerland
- Mumbai, India
- Boston, Massachusetts
- London, England
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Hong Kong, China
- Vancouver, British Columbia
- Indianapolis, Indiana
- Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- Seattle, Washington
- Sarasota, Florida
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Toronto!
Including duplicates, we rank a lowly 25th in the Google world-classiness list, making our first world-class appearance on the decidedly non-world-classy third page. Seriously, who ever clicks through to a third page of Google search results but world-class losers and desperadoes Googling their own names?
Now it may seem a little disconcerting at first glance to be behind such world-class powerhouses as Columbus and Sarasota. Even Vancouver inflicts a world-class bruise on our world-class ego by placing ahead of us. It would seem that we have a world-class struggle ahead to move up the world-class list.
But world-class wannabes should actually rejoice world-classily at the above list: we’re world-classier than New York City! And really, isn’t the world-class comparison to New York all that we care about? In fact, New York is so world-classless that it doesn’t appear anywhere in the first ten world-class pages of Google results. Now that’s something to celebrate. Quietly and with a world of class, of course.
(Even Google Canada’s results only rank us 7th on the world-classiness scale — still behind Columbus, still ahead of New York.)