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Random person name generator

duckduckgo.com

143 pointsravenstine48 comments

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Tip: can be easily accessed from your app using the DDG Answers API:

https://api.duckduckgo.com/?q=random+person+name+generator&i...

Here is my version of FakeID API: https://fakeid.now.sh/

All data from https://www.fakenamegenerator.com/

The “Details” JSON seems jumbled. See:

{"status":"success","message":"OK","data":{"Name":"Robert Ignatieff","Address":"1990 Lake Floyd Circle, Gaithersburg, MD 20877","Details":{"1":"Birthday","176":"Company","39273275":"Favorite color","7acad451-3bcd-422a-8573-b320ea2a5f91":"QR Code","1999ToyotaBandeirante":"GUID","Brown":"Vehicle", <sic>}}}

https://fakeid.now.sh/api/Gender/male/NameSet/ru/Country/us

Why are you not using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 for country codes?

might be a good place to share https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chmod+600&t=hk&ia=answer - notice little things like that regularly w/ DDG

Whenever I have a hard time finding something I am tempted to try Google. The thought of "Google is THE search engine" is still ingrained somewhere in my brain. For quite some time now, if I can't find it using DDG, Google turns out not any better (not using Cookies, not using an account that is - so no extreme search personalization) - some maybe not so obvious things I like about DDG

- it doesn't force localization as hard upon you, if you set DuckDuckGo to country xyz it seems you 'literally' get the results you would get as if you were in this country, as someone who travels frequently, or is a foreigner in a country, that is extremely nice. Besides just being insightful when doing research of course

- fewer sites are removed drom DDG's search results (we all know about takedown notices). For example in Germany there is a 'right to be forgotten', individuals can have links removed from Google if it is about them personally (unless they are a public person of interest and some other restrictions), and of course sites with copyright infringements (and yes, sometimes I am looking for some site to stream something, while I often even use yandex for that, I find sites quickly with DDG. With Google you see the notice 'sites have been removed due to copyright violations', then you can go to the lumendatabase, but there scam sites and 'legitimate' streaming sites are mixed together, so you hunt through there, it's a nightmare)

honestly don't miss Google anymore and use DDG on all my devices, but I don't want to pitch too hard. Use whatever works for you

I do this too. I try and fail to find something quick in DDG. I then try and fail to find it in google. But mentally it's hard not to chalk that up as a failure of DDG for status quo reasons.

Ah well. I'm a supporter.

Is it just generating a random name and birthday?

That seems... underwhelming compared to the hundreds of services that already exist for doing this (see: any of the results given to DDG's query) and generate a much more extensive dossier.

A good generator would come up with something ordinary sounding that doesn't correspond to any known person, I guess?

I can only think of one use case: filling out form data that you don’t want to use your real identity.

Any others?

Good test data for building your applications.

I think that's the main use case but I guess it could help when NPCs for a world or a book.

Generating bot accounts on Twitter and Reddit for you know why.

I generated a fake name and I am using it as a fake identity where I don't want to use my real name, like in a comment on youtube video. It's like my alter ego ;)

I keep getting emails for a person with the name of my fake identity.

Sounds like you and your alter ego got burned at least once.

Messing with tech support scammers, although for that purpose the Fake Name Generator (search for it) is better because it generates addresses and credit card numbers (that pass the checksum validation) too.

Sometimes when I'm feeling blue I write letters addressed to fake people and share my thoughts with them.

Can’t tell if this is /s or not, but have you considered a real life pen pal that writes back?

I have considered it before but I just don't trust real people enough to share my personal thoughts with them.

Just use a fake name with them. Like the one you would get from a generator.

Generating character names for fiction writing.

Filling out fake data for your testing or demo environments is also a good use-case.

Authors (pen names), musicians, bloggers, anyone else who wants a little privacy but still wants to share publicly.

Inside of companies with data protection requirements, these can be handier and more natural than censoring PII or PCI or replacing them with an encrypted string. It’s much more natural for the data science process.

Greeking designs is a huge use case for me. plugging in random user info into a dashboard or something.

Oh I was hoping DuckDuckGo would fake your browser personality somehow. Mac -> PC, etc

That's beyond DuckDuckGo's control since that data is controlled and sent by the browser. There are many addons for doing what you said though just look for user-agent changer or faker

Startpage's private browsing feature does something similar but far more effective.

If you just want to blend in with the crowd, you can use the tor browser without the tor proxy.

They have invested a lot of effort crafting its fingerprint. Now that they have moved away from Firefox ESR, it shouldn't come with much of a security penalty.

I sometimes use DDG for getting a UUID too :)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uuid&t=hj&ia=answer

If you like that kind of things and you dig Python, the lib "faker" (https://faker.readthedocs.io/en/master/) is a real threat:

  from faker import Faker
  fake = Faker()

  fake.name()
  # 'Lucy Cechtelar'

  fake.address()
  # '426 Jordy Lodge
  #  Cartwrightshire, SC 88120-6700'

  fake.text()
  # 'Sint velit eveniet. Rerum atque repellat voluptatem quia rerum. Numquam excepturi
  ...

There are many different generators, and you can even use l10n to generate names, phone numebers, plates, IP or ssn from different parts of the world.

It's amazing to create test data, either for dev or teaching, and I just have it autoimported in my PYTHONSTARTUP because of it.

It also plays well with "factoryboy" (https://factoryboy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to mass generate complex data set, and even add them automatically to the database.

This is the equivalent library for PHP https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker

Nice to see we all copied that from perl.

And this is the equivalent for Ruby:

https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker

I’m still very disappointed that DuckDuckHack was ended…

Related URL:

https://duckduckhack.com/

I made a random Arabic name generator around 5 years ago[0]. Data is scrapped from Tunisian electoral lists.

Feel free to use the DB, it is in sqlite.

[0] https://lab.raed.it/php/tounsi/

`rig` (random identity generator) on Linux is another useful tool for this

That's neat. I like that you can add -c N and get N identities.

> Based on "fake" written for MS-DOS. Unfortunately the author and publish date are unknown.

A bit intriguing...

It has a very limited set of seed names (or did last I checked), though can be handy.

I have on occasion created pseudonyms for various purposes. One of my favorite techniques is to combine a first name common to a particular nationality with a last name common to a different nationality. E.g. a French first name with a Japanese last name. Surprisingly, such combinations occur somewhat frequently in real life.

I wonder what kind of validity checks they have.

e.g. a lot of first/last names cannot be paired together because they would belong to different religions/ethnicities.

Probably they're sticking with just Anglosaxon names where this is far less of a problem than Middle East/India ones.

> Probably they're sticking with just Anglo-Saxon names

I don't think so, I got "Johanna Nagata", and Nagata is apparently a Japanese surname.

Less "cannot" and more "are rarely". I've encountered a few odd mixes personally.

There are sources (US SSN and census especially) of first and last name frequency by decade, though not so much first/last pairings. Gender also.

In Muslim countries, people who switch religions to/from Christianity have to change their first names if its the name of prophet/saint in the other religion.

For author and GMing purposes I can recommend https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/ , which has been a huge help for running my weekly DnD seesions.

I love that they do these. This one in particular is really helpful when greeking designs (and I guess could also be useful for D&D dungeonmasters?)

Is there a list where I can find such quick results on DDG? Like for uuid, Markdown cheatsheet, chmod, etc

The first randomly generated person I received was born within a month of me. Hiyooooo!

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