{"id":305,"date":"2006-09-27T00:21:03","date_gmt":"2006-09-26T13:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/09\/27\/name-game-ii\/"},"modified":"2006-09-27T00:29:02","modified_gmt":"2006-09-26T13:29:02","slug":"name-game-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/09\/27\/name-game-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Name Game II"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve talked before the popularity of names<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve talked before about how Jakob Nielsen<\/a> is the most preeminent Jakob<\/a> in the world… or at least the Internet according to Google, which is pretty much the same thing! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Now, I am wondering if there is a web-based trivia game here.<\/p>\n

Imagine a site that provides a common first name, and you and your friends try to guess who the highest page-ranked person of that name is.<\/p>\n

Actually, there’s some manual work here to filter through names – company names don’t count. So, let’s try another variant. One person tries to pick a first name where they think the other person won’t<\/em> be able to guess the identity of the person with the highest page-rank. Google results are listed and the players highlight the site that is the first real name. This is cached for later attempts, until a reasonable database is produced for the first game, which could be played as a single player game.<\/div>\n

Experiment<\/h3>\n

Is this game going to be fun? Let’s play a test round and find out. <\/p>\n

I went to a list of popular names<\/a>. (Oddly, this is a different list to the one I used to last time<\/a>!) I looked for the most popular US birth name of 2005<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Experiment #1: Jacob<\/h4>\n

What a coincidence. The most popular name was Jacob! (Note the spelling’s different to Jakob Nielsen.)<\/p>\n

So who do you think the most popular Jacob is?<\/p>\n

Once you’ve guessed, let’s Google it and find out.<\/p>\n

#1 hit: the original Jacob<\/a>. He doesn’t count. Let’s try again.<\/p>\n

#4 hit: Jakob Nielsen<\/a>! No fair! Misspelling. <\/p>\n

#5 hit: Jacob Bernoulli<\/a> who died 300 years ago. Looks like I’m going to have to make up some boundaries for this game.<\/p>\n

Here’s my first draft: <\/p>\n