First and last names are good domain name investments. Think about it, have you ever looked up your name to see if it was available? Of course, you have. But, the most popular names are taken. However, the ones past the top 1000 or lower rankings, particularly last names, are still valuable. While #1 ranked Smith is the name for about 2,500,000 million people, there are still about 5,000 Hambrick’s ranked 5,003, for example. That’s a lot of potential buyers for any of the major TLD’s.

So where do you find these lists? There are a lot of sites on the web that show the data, but at the core they mostly use the 1990 US Census Data found on this page. From this page you can enter the actual file of last, and both male and female first names. The lists are shown in ranking order, along with the frequency and ranking. In addition, you can search for a name to bring up the data for the name.

Numerous sites parse and display these data in various formats. Just search for them. One nice example is this page at Mongabay.com.

Let me know in the comments any other nice name sites.

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