What you search = who you are

Microsoft’s adCenter Labs has information about and demos of “behavioral targeting system”, i.e. systems that allow you to predict what users are based on what they have done.

I found the demographics prediction demo particularly interesting. It allows to “predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to [...] search queries and webpage views”. Try it here, all you need it to type a URL or keyword. I tried with URLs:

Cocomment.com seems to be searched mostly by male below 18 (23.46% of users below 18 years old, vs 9.8% in the general population) while this blog is “18 to 24 oriented”.

MySpace.com gives some interesting results shown below:

I wouldn’t take this data for truth but it is interesting (and a bit scary of course) to see what advertisers are trying to do with all the data they are gathering on us.