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tips What tool do you use for popularity of first names?

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Bob Hawkes

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NameTalent.com
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I was wondering what tools people use to assess how popular a first name is?

There are a variety of tools available that are country specific. For example, for US data one can use the tool as part of the DomainAcademy course, for those enrolled, or this useful site (thank you DomainPunk!) https://www.mynamestats.com/First-Names-Search.html

But what about a one-site place to find global estimates of how many people in the world have a certain first name?

Yes, things like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube etc. searches, or Google tools, can give an indirect metric related to popularity, or simply a Google search for that matter, but has any entity tried to consolidate national registries so one can look up an actual number?

Some sites to help people naming babies (no that is not my personal motivation :ROFL: for request) exist, generally, it seems, based on data for a specific country.

Anyway, look forward to any suggestions of useful approaches or tools.

Thank you in advance.

-Bob

PS I did try ChatGPT on a few specific names. It does give somewhat helpful answers, but not specific number I am looking for.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
PS I did try ChatGPT on a few specific names. It does give somewhat helpful answers, but not specific number I am looking for.
ChatGPT or any Generative AI is not supposed to give valid & trustworthy statistical answers. Because they were not made for that purpose.

Generative AI generates text by predicting the next most likely words for a specific prompt based on pre-trained data. Even if a version of Generative AI is trained on statistical data, because of hallucination, it cannot be trusted to produce accurate statistical answers.
 
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I got a number of responses on social media (thank you everyone), and the one that gives me what I was looking for, or near to it, is forebears.io. Thank you to Domain Authority who suggested it.

You enter a first (or last) name, and it will give you the global popularity of that name, along with a map showing relative popularity in different regions. Easy and free to use, and helpful if you register first or last names.

-Bob
 
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https://forebears.io/

oops, didn't see that you mentioned this above, Bob. since i can't delete this post, i'll just say this one works best for me, too.
 
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Generative AI is not supposed to give valid & trustworthy statistical answers.
Thanks. Agree in general. I mean the quality depends on the training and the materials it was trained on.

Since GPT 3/4 pretrained on all of Wikipedia, most of two large digitized book collections, and mainly on the Common Crawl, it can, at best, be as good as the materials available somewhere within those resources. It of course, can be subject to bias or misinterpretation within those resources. That said, if the data was reliably available within the Common Crawl, it would give data, at the time of its pretraining. Since it really is name popularity of a few decades ago (since those would be founders, store owners, and celebrities / influencers now), it would have the potential to usefully summarize data.

I only tried a few, and as mentioned it did give somewhat helpful content, such as trends with a name and occasionally repeated statistical data. It was not a direct numerical response though, which I was seeking.

-Bob
 
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I only tried a few, and as mentioned it did give somewhat helpful content, such as trends with a name and occasionally repeated statistical data. It was not a direct numerical response though, which I was seeking.
As a developer with some previous AI research experience, I'd say you shouldn't trust any transformer based AI for important statistical data, especially if you need some level of data accuracy.

However, I agree with you.
To get an approximate idea as mentioned in this post, you can use ChatGPT for sure.

If you want numerical response from ChatGPT, use the prompt like this:

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If you want numerical response from ChatGPT, use the prompt like this:
That is super helpful. I must learn how to do GPT prompts properly! B-) I just vaguely ask something, but see from your Behavior that I should be specifying exactly the format/data I want. Seriously, this will help me a lot.
Thanks again,
Bob
 
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As a developer with some previous AI research experience, I'd say you shouldn't trust any transformer based AI for important statistical data, especially if you need some level of data accuracy.

However, I agree with you.
To get an approximate idea as mentioned in this post, you can use ChatGPT for sure.

If you want numerical response from ChatGPT, use the prompt like this:

Show attachment 236339
Nice! I asked it for a list of people who had no no1 hits, in the UK, but were considered popular. It gave me so many wrong answers. I corrected it and said this person had a no1 hit, I want people who have NOT had one, and basically I tried to ask in many different ways and I got a crazy amount of wrong info. Never going to use it for anything like that again, I could have found the information quicker myself!
 
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