Am I Special?

Doesn't that mean that you don't exist? Or, at least, aren't in the USA, which to most of us in the USA, means pretty much the same thing? :)

-Rob

According to the site; The list of names from the census bureau isn't complete. For privacy reasons, names with relatively few responses were not included in the list. We used this data to create this site. Our site can only be as good as the data we have to work with.

• Around 1 out of every 10 people will have a last name not on the list.
• Around 1 out of every 10 people will have a first name not on the list.

Yup. I know there are people with my last name, and I know there are even more people with my last name (I am a Facebook friend with a dozen of those), but I was looking for the combination of the two - unfortunately this database is useless - it does not register anyone with either my first or my last name.

213 of my name, which strikes me a low (my name is pretty common). No hits for my wife's first name.

Hmmm......

I am also nonexistent. However, another way to check is to enter my first and last
name (inside quotes) on google. When I do that I find there is exactly one person
listed on the web with my name.

Yeah, pretty lousy database. Only 420 for my (rather uncommon) last name - seems quite low. Once I found a child with my name who lives in Florida, so there are two of us, and that's just people who made it into Google.

How many people DO they have in the database, anyway? Or is that too technical a question for them?

I also get the 0 result.

I got 0, too, but it's not really surprising. There aren't a lot of people named Alon in the US. My family name is toward the bottom of the top 1,000, though.

There are 6 people that have my name.

cool!

The site says there are 1066 people named David Harmon in the US.

Of course, I've usually seen at least one other person with my first and last names in my local phone book! The time I Googled myself was kind of depressing, as one of my namesakes is working for the Smithsonian and writing books on biodiversity. (That's a total "wish I was there" moment for me....)

Interestingly, there seem to be a few thousand female Davids, though that may be a quantization artifact.

Just remembered that there was something about names on Andrew Gelman's blog (he's a social/political statistician). A quick search and I found he had an entry on maps of surname frequencies, as well one on trends in baby names.

There are apparently 7 people with my name in the US, and I'm not one of them.

Bob

There are 19 people with my name according to meme.