There's an interesting new resource - the World Names Profiler. It holds data for approximately 300 million people in 26 countries of the world, representing a total population of 1 billion people in those countries. In our database there are 8 million unique surnames and 5 million unique forenames. You're supposed to be able to input a surname and see where it's popular around the world, check on regions and so on. Consequently it's going to be of interest to genealogists, and that's a huge army of people on the net. I'd like to be able to tell you more, but I've been trying dozens of times over the last 24 hours to access it and the best I can show you is:
The problem here is one that we saw when the 1901 census went online - huge interest to the extent that the hardware simply cannot cope. Genealogy is, if I remember correctly, even more searched on the net than pornography and you can never have enough resources for the overwhelming interest. I do feel sorry for them, but on the other hand, if you're launching a product like this you would do your homework and ensure you'd got the necessary resources, wouldn't you?
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