Dustice

Awhile ago I checked out -> this Gender-Estimation site. it’s a pretty neat script that guesses your gender based upon your browsing history. Try it out if you haven’t already (it’s mostly pretty accurate).

My stats are 99% Male 1% Female (gaming and tech sites nicely skew the scale) xP. Post your stats in the comments if you have time - it’s really interesting to see how accurate the tool is (I’ve already seen that it doesn’t work so great for guys who visit a lot of shopping sites *ahem*, and girls who visit a lot of news sites, as well as geekier girls).

Nice little trick, but the scripts behind it are what make it interesting. First is the Social History script by Paul Cook, which uses a CSS leak to find out which sites you visited. Basically it “displays” a ton of URLs and checks which ones your browser marks as blue or purple. Mike combines this script with the Quantcast Demographics and a bit of math in order to guess your gender.

The applications of the Social History script are enormous - and I expect a ton of sites to be using it soon to better serve their users as well as more little tricks such as Mike’s.

Looking at the gender-guessing results, it’s also really interesting to check out random sites you visit on Quantcast for more specific demographics (search for a site and then click on “See Demographics”. Most of them are to be expected:

• WoWwiki.com - Male, Young Adult, Asian
• Engadget.com - Male, Young Adult, Affluent, College Graduate
• NYtimes.com - Older, No Kids, Grads/Post-Grads

While a few are more surprising:

• Amazon.com - Female, No Kids, Grads/Post-Grads
• Yahoo.com - Female, Young Adult, Asian, Less Affluent
• Facebook.com - Female, African-American, Has Kids, Affluent
• Wikipedia.com - Male, Teen, Asian

Never would’ve guessed =P