Apparently, you can find out at the World Names Profiler.
This is a nifty idea. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know about my surname (nearly exclusive to Great Britain and its colonies).
On a whim, I plugged in “Boateng”. Great Britain came up first. Who knew?
“Mensah”. Same thing.
Apparently West Africa is a giant hole in the surname map. As it turns out, their results are based off of data from 26 countries…
Well, garbage in, garbage out, I guess.
Well, that’s the difference between a neat little applet that takes minimum effort to research/create and a big program that holds all 200 or so countries.
Well, the program itself doesn’t grow so much… That’s the beauty of computers – they bring a whole new meaning to “economy of scale”. To a computer, 26 is the same as 200… but to a human it’s a tenfold increase and the effort to manage it is proportional (or worse).
But you’re right that the effort lies in the research – that’s where you find the value. Unfortunately, that’s also the really expensive bit