I can’t think of anything else to call it. Whitepages.com has launched a new part of their site that allows you to enter a name and get a breakdown of how that name is represented across the United States. You can check it out at http://names.whitepages.com .

Enter a first and/or last name, and a state you want to search (you can also choose all states.) I did a search for John Doe in all states. And then I got a page full of John Doe information.

I got a table of where Doe is ranked in the phone book (6,161 of 6,843,982), where John is ranked (1 of 2,634,850) and the next rankings for first and last names. I got the ranking of the full name — 14,095 of 47,613,506 — which puts John Doe between John Emery and John Hendrickson in popularity.

Whitepages.com also has listings for the most popular states containing that name, and at the end of the page, a map of the US with states color-coded by how many people have that name. Lots of John Does in New York and Georgia, for some reason.

This will be a great tool for genealogists, and for the rest of us, a very weird timesink.