This website is overloaded with adds. It almost feels like a scam. Based on the fact that almost all other comments are not talking about it, I guess at least one of the following hypotheses is true (if not all of them):
- most people here use an efficient addblocker
- The website changed since its first appearance on the first page (maximize revenue?)
- some comments are sponsored
- on mobile it feels overwhelming but on desktops it's more bearable
ha! I don't use an adblocker, and when I first loaded this page, it looked great! and then I quickly quit out and came to the comments instead of using it. And then I saw this, and went back...
Oh. I just wasn't on the page long enough to see just how many ads were loaded, wow!!
The continual attention loss dealing with ads is certainly more than the once-per-install job of turning on an adblocker. I'm surprised it isn't mandated in corporate environments to recover attention loss of employees.
got curious enough to turn off my adblocker: i was presented with TWO ads on desktop
i think you overloaded the term overloaded.
though they are huge on mobile.. and appear to be subleased or something. also there appears to be another ad element below the "(C)" line on mobile which is missing on desktop
This made me curious, so I reloaded the site without uBlock origin, and for the most part looks the same; There is one ad at the top, one at the bottom, and a cookie info style ad banner scrolling with the page, 3 ads in total.
That's a rather humane amount and the only one that's really intrusive is the one all the way on the top, the scrolling banner can even be minimized to remove it, which leaves a total of 2 ads on the site, at least for me on Chrome.
This is the same for me. I only get the top and bottom banner ads that I was used to seeing 10+ years ago. Still too big, but they don't make the site unusable.
I can't reproduce it anymore however when I last went there it somehow took me to one of those shady background check websites. I, too, can post spam websites if we want to go down that road
I've accepted that the internet wants my data and have been using Brave for a few years now. Seems like a fair compromise, and their adblocking is pretty decent, even if I get to put up with their little pop ups now and then for BAT tokens.
I have it set to maximum ad rate, and just ignore them mostly. They are sort of intrusive, but also not really. Depends on what you are doing. I've had them pop up in the middle of working on some word file or excel sheet; but I also get my discord notifications the same way as well...
They don't interrupt gameplay though... usually? Depends on if you have a browser open while playing something in windowed mode I think. At that point you might get one or two popping through due to the browser being open. That sort of thing.
Again, seems like a fair compromise to me. People onboard with BAT get paid one way or the other, and I get to deal with less ads overall. (Seriously, it's a chasm of epic proportions the comparison between before and after.)
Youtube works fine, most websites work fine, and if ever one doesn't want to play nice; you either find something else or just turn off Brave shield temporarily. I've had to do this from time to time with banking for instance, since it was blocking something related to the banks log in process. lol. So yeah, it's not perfect by any means. But it's a far cry better than the others so far in my opinion.
And for those who may want to reply with something about how X browser is worse or better than Brave; that's nice but honestly at this point I don't really care anymore. I have Firefox on standby for those few situations where chromium based browsers just don't want to work, and guess what, that's basically all of them now; Brave included.
So far, this combo has fared me pretty well. If I could get something that does what Brave does even better without the crypto stuff included, I probably would use it instead. But that's probably going to end up being a heavily modified version of Firefox or Chromium somehow; and thus my earlier point about being 'good enough'.
There aren't enough tokens in the world to make me accept what you describe about brave. Always surprised when I read HNers actually using it. It just sounds really scummy what they do to me.
Quoting your dead comment for educational purposes...
> Just like how none here have a legitimate reason to downvote something that is just my personal preference and opinion based on usage.
Please read the guidelines. Crabbing about downvotes is on there.
> (Seriously people... be better than redditors.)
Please read the guidelines. Calling this reddit is on there.
> P.S. Who ever flagged my comment... grow up. There is no possible way I am breaking any rules right now. Not that I am immediately aware of at least.
Saying 'be better than' shouldn't be breaking any rules in regards to 'calling this reddit'.
I'm merely making a point that I've seen similar actions performed by redditors, and that I expect better. Is that really so terrible? If you think it is, you need to grow up and come to understand how reality actually works friend. Just because you don't like something someone is saying, doesn't make them wrong to say it. Not always at least.
For instance, if you are actually right to say what you said, and you see me as annoyed or angry for it being that way; are you wrong for having said it?
It's the same thing from my angle. We just have different views on what is acceptable in society, digital or analog as it were. I think it's acceptable to call people out for acting like deplorables. You think it's acceptable to call people for acting how you figure is deplorable. So we aren't really all that different...
I just stand by my opinion, because its correct; like it or not.
I mean for pete's sake... the website doesn't even have downvote arrows (that I can see at least) and yet some of you are still downvoting... lol... Just like Redditors.
Stick around and make positive contributions and you'll see a downvote button. Can't remember if it's 250 or 750 karma.
Arguing with somebody who's patiently explaining why you got flagged isn't productive. I didn't flag or downvote your dead comment, but for the record, I would have if it wasn't already dead. I'd downvote the comment I'm replying to, but cool feature, you don't get to downvote direct replies.
And, downvotes are for quiet disagreement. Unpopular opinions go grey. Moderation keeps the site more pleasant than other news aggregators. Greying out unpopular opinions does seem to quell the flame wars a bit. You'll get used to it. Nobody owes you a fight. After all, that's what reddit is for.
Fair enough I suppose, but just because I am saying things that disagree with you, doesn't not necessarily mean we are arguing. I am just stating my opinion on the matter, and being resolute about it. Just because you believe it is an argument, does not make it so.
And again, just because you think you are correct Klyrs, doesn't mean you are. Even if the admins/moderators agree with you, because their own logic may well be flawed too.
Of course this applies equally to me, but again... making inference of ones actions resembling the distasteful actions of others, should never be 'not allowed'. Such thinking enables terrible people to be terrible, and shouldn't be tolerated.
Finally, I know that nobody owes me a fight. This is why I say I am not arguing with you. I am merely making my opinion clear. If you see this as a fight, that's entirely on you.
That top ad, the one with the "search for names" text boxes that sure looks like you're entering info for your website that actually redirects you to another search website... yeah, that one is particularly pernicious.
Vaguely related amusing bit of trivia: the word for smith or blacksmith is one of the most common names about everywhere: Smith (England), Schmidt (Germany), Smit/Smet (Belgium, Netherlands), Fabre/Favre/Lefèvre/Lefèbvre (France), Ferrari/Fabri (Italy), Ferrero/Herrero (Spain), Ferreiro (Portugal), Kowalski (Poland), Haddad (Morocco), Demirci (Turkey), Demirdjian (Armenia), Gof/Goff/Le Goff (Brittany, Wales), Gowan/Gowen/Gow/Gough (Scotland), Kuznitz/Kuznetz/Kuznetzov (Russia), etc.
Also lots of religious names, at least in Spain but probably in many romance countries, since last names were derived from the father's name: Pedro (given) => Perez (son of Pedro), Alvaro => Alvarez, etc.
To add to this bit of trivia. In Sweden this was never a thing where your job became your surname. If you go to a cemetery you'll sometimes see the occupation on the gravestone though, especially on older graves and if it was a more higher class job.
Admittedly it seems less common, but... there certainly are some Smeds in Sweden (and the rest of Scandinavia). The names are not ALL sons/sens and geographic features... https://forebears.io/surnames/smed
Less common is an understatement. Less than 300 people have Smed(h) as their surname in Sweden. We also don't know if they originated in Sweden or if this was a Swedification of a foreign surname.
A pice of trivia: in Polish it should also be Kowal (Koval). Land owners were taking the names of the places they owned, so if you owned a village called, called Paris, you took the name Pariski (adjective). This created a culture of adding a ski to your name. There was even a book of peasants that weren't upper class, but took that name.
For some reason the version in Portuguese is Ferreira (the feminine form), not Ferreiro. No idea what the reason is. I somehow doubt that medieval Portugal was exceptionally gender-progressive.
It's the feminine because it refers to the family, and "família" is feminine. e.g. "João Ferreira" would be "John, [of the] blacksmith [family]". That's also the reason a few surnames include de/da/do (of/of the).
A bit of googling gives me the explanation of "ferreira" being an old word for "iron mine", which to be honest is coherent with modern portuguese forms like "pedreira", toponymics ("ferreira" is a common place name), and the way names come about (João da Ferreira would own or work in the iron mine, or just come from one of the villages where there was an iron mine).
Armenian is Darbinian/Tarpinian (Demirjian is the Turkish-Armenian hybrid form). There's also related Nalbandian (farrier / horseshoe blacksmith).
BTW, the theory I've heard is that this surname prevails due to survivorship bias, in countries that were constantly at war and the male population was being decimated, the smiths had to stay back home manufacturing weapons (same logic applies for "miller" and "tailor" and "mayor", all very common last names in large parts of Europe).
Not in Romania (the Hungarian name Kovacs is #90, and the Romanian names Feraru/Fieraru are not in top 100) But Popa (priest) is #1, Popescu (son of a priest) is #2, Cojocaru (furrier) is #46 and Szabo (tailor in Hungarian) is #62
It is sad that most, if not all, of the databases don’t take into account accents and other phonetic signs. My last name is completely different with and without and accent. Actually in my case different languages, without accent is a Spanish last name and with the accent is Catalan.
That means that people like me have to keep record of our real names.
Also curious that databases have been one step backwards, in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with modern technologies.
That is indeed sad. I, on the other hand, was pleasantly surprised that the site makes a distinction between "ß" and "ss".
This usually presents a problem online, and I've sometimes considered changing my last name because of that. I had never thought about the fact that this must be even harder for French and Spanish speakers, with the high amount of accents compared to Umlauts and the "sharp s" in German.
> ... in Spain Catholic churches kept record of all the babies born in their towns with correct spelling and that is lost now with modern technologies.
I found this to be the opposite.
My church record contains a hispanicized version of my name, whereas the government has the proper one. Reason given was that the church wouldn't admit certain regional spellings.
Also, acute accents have been recorded in the census databases since forever, at least in Spain.
Tons of surnames were truncated or spelled phonetically over the years because not everyone wants to hand hold an immigration official through the proper spelling of a name that they can't pronounce and may have characters that aren't in the alphabet they're using. Even if you don't say "screw it, good enough" after the first few syllables you can lose resolution because there can be multiple character combos that generate the same sound in the source language but there may be fewer used for that in the destination language.
Is this normalised at all? It always seems to look like a map of where cities are, although there are some interesting trends, especially if you pick surnames that have more recently become prevalent in a country.
Might vary a lot based on the country and the name chosen.
Eg. Italy has only been a single state since the 1860s, and regional languages can surface a lot of differences. I entered my mom's southern Italian maiden name and got pretty high correlation to places where her dad's family had ties...
Doesn't seem like it is, and the sibling xkcd is spot on. For rare surnames it's still possible to see trends, especially if you know the high-density areas.
I tried some random surnames for Germany, and while Klein ("Small") is pretty popular, the Latin variant Minor has some obvious hotspot:
https://www.kartezumnamen.eu/en/index.php?sur=minor
Also, TIL: "Ficken" (=to f...k) seems to be a (rare) surname in the northern parts of Lower Saxony.
It's kind of funny, my surname actually does have a huge cluster around my hometown, but my paternal grandfather I inherited that name from was from another part of Germany and only moved here in the 1940s.
One time someone from the USA contacted me on Facebook because he has the same surname, to see if we were related. We weren't, but his great-grandparents were from my hometown and emigrated to the USA around 1900 or so (before WW I, anyway).
Fun fact, in 1998, I did an internship at a local hi-fi shop and met a guy who actually had the exact same name as my father. But wait, there's more: He also was in the same line of work as my father. He did not look anything like my father, fortunately, that would have freaked my out in a big way.
Reminds me of a scare I had when I was dating my now wife. We were discussing our families and turns out our mothers had the same first name... and their maiden surnames were the same. It's a fairly common Irish name and there was no traceable relation but talk about a potential freakout! Made for a great bit during my father-in-law's speech at our wedding.
In the part of Scotland I come from there was a distinct lack of variation in surnames - so much so that people would use so-called "tee-names" to identify different families
e.g. My ancestor David Wood had the family tee-name "King":
I'm glad it worked out for you. It is a funny story, though, so don't be mad at me for chuckling a little bit. (I guess the guests at your wedding did so, too.)
A friend of my mother's has to twin sons who married two women who had not only the same first name but also worked at the same company. Both ladies took their husbands' names, so they both had the same names. I imagine it must have been both funny and confusing.
When I last worked as a sysadmin, our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees, so the idea of having two employees with the same name drives me a little bit crazy. (Even worse, though, it did not use FOREIGN KEY constraints but TRIGGERs. I am not sure about performance implications, but from an aesthetical perspective, this is just wrong.)
our ERP software used the name as a primary key for employees
As someone with a common first name and common surname, this drives me bananas.
I still get emails from my graduate university to email: first.last@uni.edu meant for some undergraduate in a sea of 50k students, and have to reply that I've had that email for 20 years and they have the wrong person with a very common name.
I have to admit I found the very concept of using a value that could change as a primary repulsive from an aesthetic point of view. It's just bad database design.
Still, I feel for you. My primary concern, though, was that it made life more complicated for me. But email adresses were separate from ERP user names, and we did not have two employees with the same name, so first.last@company.com was good enough for our purposes.
Those are two people from a group of at least several hundred. I'm not sure that's strong evidence. I count it as one those weird coincidences that make life interesting.
Of course, they might be a lot more insurance agents with my surname, but I wouldn't know one way or the other. Also, I like weird coincidences, so I'm rather biased.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, though. I just don't have enough data to support your idea.
Years ago I was in my ancestral village and met a man (with same very distinctive family name) countless generations removed who looked exactly like my grandfather. Even the same physical, stocky build... and yeah, I had to just kind of mind my manners because it was super surreal. Guess it's kinda like the Old Spice commercials - if your granddad wasn't good looking you wouldn't be here?
Very neat. My ancestors are not European, they are Lebanese, but I was able to find their last name in the countries they emigrated to long ago in Europe, and the cities make sense, although there's more than I thought in certain countries!
For those interested, depending on where you live, you can access Ancestry.com through the Public Library for free. In Ottawa, that was case, although as of Jan. 1, 2022, you have to go in person. Through there, you can search by name or even place of origin, and you can see the immigration records. May of which even have the photos! I noted some people that went to Brazil and could see the entire person and his family. I'm sure many people don't know that.
I was able to see my Grandfather's record to Canada in 1925 New Brunswick, and my Great Uncle's record in 1911 to Omaha, Nebraska. I'm also told my Great Grandfather came to the US in 1901, but I have been unable to track his record, because after having manually reviewed 1000+ records, I can tell you with confidence that spelling errors are rampant.
You had names change from say Smith, to Sally, and you can see the scratches as the records were modified. It's hilarious! Also, they even misspell the names in the same record. So searching is very, very hard, and instead you have to put in a broad search, like city (which can also be misspelled), and then manually look through the records. The only thing that I can say that is pretty accurate is the year. So that should be your starting point.
I was able to find some of my ancestors who came to the US from those records. People usually came by ship and New York City was one of the main points of entries to the US.
Thanks for the tip! I just tried it quickly, but will need to try many more combinations. The last name of my Great Grandfather is Khouri, which means Priest, and is very, very common. However, when we found his record in 1925 in Canada, it was spelled "Elkhoui". Note the missing 'r', and they attached "El" to it.
So as you can see, I would never have guessed it, and we found it by manually searching by timeline for anyone from "Lebanon", or "Syria", or even "Turkey", as data entry was usually done by just a person that may have never heard of that language, and just "guessed". Remember, IDs are a modern invention, so back then, it was not standardized.
I don't have any numbers, but I wouldn't say there was a lot, because European cities were pretty established, so hard to start a new life there. But I do know that people from my Mom's village were doing trades with Europeans, and my Great Great Grandmother, was called Marianna and my Great Aunt was called Juliette. They also could speak French in the early 1900s, well before WW1 or WW2. Many people think that French was introduced after WW2 during the French Mandate, but Lebanese have been travelling overseas for a long time, and had ties to many countries. I think I read somewhere that even going back to 1600s they had ties to France.
On the other hand, there are also ties to Greece from the Orthodox side that date back > 1500 years.
But getting back to Europe, I would say mass migration were popular to South America, especially Brazil (from my Dad's village, many people went there, in addition to the US, and North America. I even met a Lebanese friend from Curaçao, and when I was at his house, they didn't speak Lebanese, they spoke Papiamento! Basically, they adapt and learn whatever language is needed. Remember, Lebanon was once a Roman Province (although Latin wasn't spoke everywhere), and before Greek language was prevalent, and before that, Syriac (western aramaic). In the year 600, Arabic started moving in. So having to learn new languages is not new in our history.
So far, what I've done is take my Dad's stories, and try to link them to actual records, and so far he's been right! He loves history, and my mom is a walking encyclopedia of family names. They know the villages the names come from.
Oh, I even found graves listed in the US from early 1800s with the name Khouri, and it was of a soldier. I suck at US history, so whatever war was back then, there was a Lebanese person there.
Oh yeah ! Onomastics (the study of names) is very cool ! And a nice data point to add to personalized data. I did a project with that a while ago to study discrimination in France (https://namograph.antonomase.fr/) and it worked pretty well as long as you have large samples and stick to distributions comparisons.
It seems accurate, albeit a bit outdated, for my extremelly rare familly name (I know most of the people who bear it, and we're still clustering around what I assume is our ancestral village), but the more common form of the same name is not in the database.
I concur, my surname exists only twice in Germany. And this map shows the place where I live and where I used to live. The place where my mother lives is not on the map. I guess the map is rather detailed. I'd like to know where the data is from.
Where is this data coming from? I have a rare Italian surname and this finder puts a very small circle (1-5) on the very region my grand grand father departed to America in 1895.
I'd love to see this done to something like Lithuania where surname ending differs among men, wives, girls (e.g. Tulas, Tuliene, Tulaite). Also, how do the compound names get dissected (e.g. Mary Scott-Doe)?
Wow, I have a very uncommon Italian surname, and I was super surprised to see the results. The majority of my relatives were concentrated in where I know them to be, with a few outliers in the north and south.
I don't see any means of seeing names without actually entering anything. If the site was intended to be used for educational purposes, it would at least show a list of common names by default.
Pretty accurate, at least for the 15 or so surnames I searched. All branches of my family, except one, come from Spain. I rearched most of the surnames and was able to get information on many (Basque, Castillian, Cantabric) and those roots are still reflected on this map. By that I mean they are most dense where they originated (some even 700 years ago), indepedent if they're toponymic or not.
What I find rather depressing about these kinds of things is that they will be utterly useless to learn anything from going forward in just a few more generations, after the atrocity of forced integration and so called "diversity" will permanently and irrevocably muddle and pollute all cultures and people and societies all throughout the world.
We will soon no longer need to fight over ethnicity and race, because we will all be the same muddled and meaningless mass where the Ministry of Truth tells us that today the Italians are equally Indians, as Nigerians are Swedes.
The process is already quite advanced in the USA, where unique cultures, dialects, histories, cuisine, traditions, etc. that existed until rather recently, have been utterly shattered and deracinated and polluted through homogenization and corporatization of society, not to mention both sent into the memory hole and been rewritten a few times by now.
To see an even more extreme example of what the outcome of all this "globalization" and fraudulent "diversity" will be is to look to the ancestors of blacks in America that have suffering from the effects of being captured in war in Africa, sold into slavery, mixed together and torn apart socially, and shipped across an ocean where they were then traded and mixed and muddled wantonly just like "diversity" intends to do. They suffer from an acute absence and intentional destruction of what little culture and society they had. That is what the oligarchs of today have in store for all of us regular folks just like the oligarch plantation owners of the past perpetrated on humanity.
And don't make the mistake if you think "white people" deserve the atrocity of "diversity" that has targeted them up to this point, it will invariably come for you and your culture and your society too, only there will be no one left and no moral argument to defend your culture then.
Why are you so attached to recent history? Populations and cultures have always been in flux throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Nearly every language and religion that have ever existed are now extinct. You don't get Italians, Indians, or Nigerians unless that happens in the first place.
Here are some more facts that might melt your mind:
- Until very recently, there were no Spanish speakers in the Americas.
- Ancient "European" admixtures have been found in modern-day China.
- 50,000 years ago, the inhabitants of the British Isles had dark skin and light hair like Melanesians.
You are expressing a forbidden truth quite well. The marketing power behind this agenda does an incredible job of scrubbing away any of the ill effects of globalization paired with an obvious effort to discredit and obfuscate any coherent arguments against it.
For common surnames, yes. Mine is quite rare, and while there are naturally a few hits in Berlin, most are concentrated in Southwest Germany, specifically Stuttgart. But you're right that it would be interesting to see the data normalized to population.
This seems to have answered a longstanding question I had about French surnames. I had come across a presentation given by a person bearing the name "La Rochefoucauld" and I always wondered if she was descended from the eponymous noble family or related to the famous writer. This website tells me that in France the name "La Rochefoucauld" is uncommon but not rare so I guess the answer to that question is "maybe".
I also searched for "Monteverdi" out of curiosity and the largest cluster bearing that name are in Lombardy centred around Cremona, which was indeed where the famous composer was born four and a half centuries ago.
It's one of the most ancient and illustrious noble families in France. There's virtually no chance somebody would bear than name without an actual relationship to the familly. They'd risk litigation, for one.
Very interesting, especially for less popular or more regional names.
Would love to know more about how it's done: What is the source of those mapping between names and geo locations? Public phone books to get the address and then some reverse geo-coding?
Here's some of the sources I've seen when working on that topic [1] : Census data, Phone books, Academic bibliographic databases (web of science, pubmed), list of athletes at olympic games, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, ...
Seems like a scam to collect credit card information from browsers that are not safe enough. When I click on the name field I get a message saying "Automatic credit card filling is disabled because this form does not ..."
It works quite well, but bear in mind that the dataset must be already quite old. Based on my ancestors extremely rare name (only family in Germany) I would say at least 15 years old – but accurate for that matter!
It have some much more up to date info in the UK - it definitely has data from the last 5 years as I can see:
* my last 3 houses
* my sisters uni locations (quite distinctive due to the campus location)
* my family home
* my dads home (post-divorce)
Our surname is uncommon and I know for a fact I'm the only one in my county, my dad in his, and my sister was the only one ever at her uni. Of course there could be others I don't know in these towns, but when we are talking <30 locations total and I know people at each of them and my immediate family accounts for nearly a third of locations...
Suspect it's someone trolling a census. There's also a Skywalker in London, which is probably more likely to be someone that took the campaign to get Jedi recognised as a religion in the UK way too far than the last vestiges of the Skywalker dynasty
Here's what I thought was really great about this: My family originated in a European country not included in the list. In the 1600s (maybe even late 1500s) we took refuge in one of these countries that allowed a degree of religious tolerance in a specific area. Over the next century, many picked up and came to the new world.
Anyway, point being it was really neat to see my family name still in that very specific area, despite it being a name that would automatically stand out even today as "not from around here."
Started looking av UK and tried a few I could think of. I'm from Sweden so I went for the obvious ones like Smith, Black, White and then just for laughs continued with colors (oops, that was UK so colours, i suppose). Went with Red, Blue and so on, was surprised by how many Pinks there were but then hit "gold" (1861 places) with Magenta, one place!
My wifes maiden name is unique, several generations ago (early 1900s or so) her ancestors took their German surname and added a French La to the beginning. Won't show up on any of these maps becuase they we are in the US.
My mother's maiden appear in one place, which is the correct location for her, even if there's still a few living relatives elsewhere in France with the same name.
Basically just looks like a population map.
My surname isn't especially common, but it is quite popular as a first name.
So, there might be a high chance chance that a lot of displayed matches are false positives due to first names misinterpreted as surnames.
I thought my last name was a variation of an English last name. But apparently there's ~15000 hits on the map for my last name and only ~1000 for the name I thought was original spelling. I think this is to blame with a very famous musician having the other spelling.
For the names I looked up in the UK, this might as well have been a map of population centres. Almost every surname was focused in London, Birmingham and Manchester. It's to be expected, I suppose, but not very informative.
Depends what you're trying to extract from the data. For my rare surname, it's tiny circles corresponding to individual households, most of the UKs largest cities have no instances but there is a cluster of small circles in the towns near where my dad grew up. That's more interesting visually than the frequency being <1 per 100k population basically everywhere.
Neat. I just recently found an old letter pertaining to my great-great-grandfather selling a house in Germany prior to coming to the US in the 1880s or so. The town mentioned is the site of a cluster of his (uncommon) surname.
It would be interesting to see it on the EU level and for other countries (I understand finding the data is the hard part). There's been a lot of migration and millions of people live outside of their countries.
It has regional heat maps, but I prefer the one provided by surnamemap.eu It seems more granular and more comprehensive (my mother's maiden name is rare and it shows up on surnamemap.eu, but does not on the site that I linked to).
I've actually used the surnamemap.eu site for maaaybe 10+ years. However, I don't know if it's updated, and if so, how frequently it's updated.
Portugal is such an homogeneous country that this is basically a map of population density x national frequency of the surname. Only exception I found is Viegas, which has a higher than expected concentration in Algarve.
How did they geolocate the surnames ? Mine is pretty unique in my country and it's located in the town where I live. Where did they got this information from ?
Interesting, for Germany they don't quote any sources. My guess is that it's from the old D-Info CD-ROMS which used to be quite popular for a while. Obviously they wouldn't mention scraping that data.
doesn't France conduct census? I'm pretty sure I had to get registered when I reached the majority age. And, according to other comments, the website used phone books (which existed in France)
This map is ""fun"" if your family/ancestry was affected by the Holocaust. I am of German ancestry, with one branch being Catholic and another branch Jewish. The Catholic surname is still abundant right in the region of origin, the Jewish surname(s) are, well, let's just say they're not there.
For (very) common names, yes. Checked mine and a few other rare ones on the German map and it 100% matches the few people I know of, or the region where they hail from.
For the Netherlands, https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/index.php?taal=eng/ is a better source. It has an (IMO) better visualization and can compensate for population density. Invalshoek expect it to have better data.
