Use Your Web Browser's History to Identify Your Gender
Use Your Web Browser's History to Identify Your Gender
Posted 07/30/2008 at 11:51am
| by Paul Lilly
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Believe it or not, your browser might know more about you than even your spouse. Whether you use Firefox, Internet Explorer, or any of the several alternative browsers, a peek in your browsing history reveals what games you're playing, where you shop, what you shop for, where you booked your upcoming vacation, and it even knows what turns you on. But up until now, your browser had no way of knowing whether you're a male for female. Not anymore.
Mike Nolet, CTO and co-founder of AppNexus, has devised a nifty little algorthm that analyzes your browser's history and then predicts your gender probability. The code comes from a modified version of Paul Cook's Social History javascript, and with a little bit of tweaking, Nolet has made it capable of predicting whether you're a male or female. But just how accurate is it? After quickly analyzing the sites I had recently visited (it works much faster on Firefox than IE), the likelihood of my being male came back 100 percent. Save for this one Halloween party in college, that's pretty damn accurate. And eerie. Are there really no women who dig shopping at Newegg, throwing down cards at Pokerstars, and drooling over Kawasaki's 2008 sport bike lineup?
Try it out for yourself and post your results below.
Image Credit: Flickr inju
More like this
inoitall
August 05, 2008 at 12:59pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 13%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 87%
Site Male-Female Ratio cnet.com 1.56 reuters.com 1.99 pandora.com 0.9 tomshardware.com 2.33 Well, not exactly accurate when you consider that I'm a female gamer who is currently looking into rebuilding her PC. Plus I was on other sites today that this algorithm did not pick up, like newegg.
Oh well, I'm secure in my feminimity. :-)
Keith E. Whisman
August 04, 2008 at 2:21am
I wonder if it guesses your a chick when you know that your a man if that means that you have a predisposition to homosexuality or if it's just plain wrong?
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 33%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 67%
Site Male-Female Ratio divx.com 1.99 I ran Ccleaner befor running this and this is the result.
I wonder what it would come up with if I visited porn and liberal websites. Perhaps visit Obama's site and then run the Algorithm. I'll be back
Keith E. Whisman
August 04, 2008 at 2:34am
No difference. It says that it uses the male/female ratios from the top 10k websites. I guess my top 10k porn sites are not counted as the numbers did'nt change and neither did they change after visiting liberal websites and Obamas website.
Queenof1
August 03, 2008 at 5:42pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 87%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 13%
I used my work computer. I'll try my laptop for comparison.
nedwards
August 01, 2008 at 7:44am
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%Whew. Glad that's cleared up.
sirphunkee
July 31, 2008 at 10:16am
I don't need to run the script, the picture Paul put with this article sums up the gender divide in this household perfectly lol. My wife laughed as hard as I did when I showed it to her.
Our computer room is often filled with the lilting melodies of Diner Dash 27, peppered with cries of "Tango down!" ;)
clone4crw
July 31, 2008 at 7:22am
IT SAYS IM FEMALE!!!!!!!!!!!
CRAP!
ubuntu:0wned, pwnd, and re0wned
orca11
July 31, 2008 at 5:56am
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 19%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 81%
Site Male-Female Ratio flickr.com 1.15 bestbuy.com 1.11 verizonwireless.com 0.77 cnet.com 1.56 foxnews.com 1.41 sprint.com 0.77 reuters.com 1.99 slickdeals.net 1.27
CrimsonKnight13
July 31, 2008 at 6:02am
This is on my work PC... I'll attempt it on my home PCs to how it turns out. Not sure about the script since
I'm definitely a 100% male geek.
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 56%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 44%
frdbrlw
July 31, 2008 at 12:38am
doesnt seem to work right for me i am definetly not a female
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 81%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 19%
Site Male-Female Ratio yahoo.com 0.9 myspace.com 0.74 microsoft.com 1.08 ebay.com 1.11 homedepot.com 0.94 playlist.com 0.45 fancast.com 0.89 pennfoster.edu 0.77
tempestryder
July 30, 2008 at 7:29pm
99% female
1% male
Im a guy that likes to cook... sue me. ~Sashays out~
Nogoodname
August 04, 2008 at 5:45pm
it's just that at lot more women then men like to cook. Although to be fair most famous chefs are male (at least in the books that I read, don't know about the real world since i don't eat at restaurants. That is because i'm 15 and my mom makes very good food).
Caboose
July 30, 2008 at 5:00pm
When I rans it at work, on a work PC, the results where this:
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 50%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 50%
The majority of people I work with are male...
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
Paul_Lilly
July 30, 2008 at 5:37pm
Had your cache/history been cleared recently, or perhaps automatically at work whenever you close the browser? If there's no history, it will spit out a 50/50 probabilty, which I suppose one could argue is inaccurate if factoring in the number of male vs female computer users.
Roykirk
July 30, 2008 at 3:09pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 2%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 98%
Spot on, though I'm not sure how it works. The list of sites and the ratio numbers are just gibberish to me.
dreamreality
July 30, 2008 at 2:51pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%that's a win.
Budgetperson
July 30, 2008 at 1:36pm
Pretty good - but I just cleared my broswer history so all it has is this -
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 8%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 92%
Site Male-Female Ratio google.com 0.98 adobe.com 0.87 meebo.com 0.83 newegg.com 2.23 filefront.com 1.63 tomshardware.com 2.33 gmail.com 0.9 nvidia.com 1.99
www.upbeatpc.com
-it-
July 30, 2008 at 1:05pm
female 22%
male 87%
part of it i think comes from my dad using my pc to browse a anniversary gift. :p
wk
July 30, 2008 at 12:53pm
mine goes as:
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%
really amazing
"MPC is my home page"
silverblack
July 30, 2008 at 12:52pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 17%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 83%
This stat surprised me
gamestop.com 0.94 Ratio of males to females
Does this mean there are now more female gamers out there?
SEALBoy
July 30, 2008 at 12:06pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 1%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 99%
And not a single pr0n site in my history, mind you.
AndyYankee17
July 30, 2008 at 12:01pm
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 36%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 64%,
It's crap
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