Microsoft Says Google is for Girls
Posted by on June 28, 2006 at 01:30 PM
As a programmer, I do what I can to keep up-to-date with all the hip and happening developments in technology. That is why I was excited Monday, when news leaked out that Microsoft had released a new tool in its AdCenter Labs. The tool allows marketers to predict visitor demographics using sample data from Microsoft itself.
Excited about the new tool, I started playing around! Searches for 'perl', a programming language that we use for most of our development here at Oneupweb, yields a distribution of 72% male and 28% female searchers, with a 36% chance that the searcher is between 25 and 34.
So far, so good; the AdCenter numbers mesh well with my empirical knowledge of other perl users both in and out of house.
I run another test, this time for 'baby names' (one of MSN's recommendations). Once again the results strongly line up with what I'd expect - 76% female, and 71% between 18 and 34 years old.
At this point I'm starting to get that warm fuzzy feeling that a programmer gets when he encounters a project that's been crossing its T's and dotting its I's properly.
So I do some more tests just for the fun of it:
- 'Nintendo DS' 56% Female, 37% 35-49
- 'SEO' 62% Male, 30% 35-49
That's all pretty interesting, so I goof off just a bit more before putting my nose back to ye old grindstone. I click the little 'URL' button, and enter 'http://www.google.com' and get a bit of a suprise: apparently 100% of the people searching for Google's URL are female and between the ages of 25-34.
Now, I'd understand it if the percentage was more like 60 or 75%, but 100%? It seems a bit, umm, manufactured.
Granted, Microsoft does have a little disclaimer at the bottom of the page saying that this is still just a proof of concept, and that MSN isn't sharing the size of its sample data. So it might well be that in MSN's sample space only one or two people actually searched for its competitor's search engine, or perhaps the tool isn't quite ready for prime time yet; I certainly don't know.
I do know that I will have to check back after Microsoft has had some time to apply some more polish, because this could be a very useful tool, someday.
Tags
microsoft
adcenter labs
demographics
Category
Technology
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Comments (4)
Posted on July 3, 2006 01:20 PM
Does this tool scan for hits on the website, or just searches for the website? For instance, if I go to www.google.com, does it track that, or does it only track it if my homepage is msn.com, and I use MSN search to look for "google.com"?
Posted on July 3, 2006 01:41 PM
As far as I can tell, their tool only looks at clicks from their msn.com search engine. So unless you were to go to msn.com and search for google.com, they wouldn't be able to record it. This could then be interpreted as: of all the people who have msn as their homepage, only females search for google.com.
Posted on April 19, 2007 06:24 PM
Brin and Page are really handsome geeks. The result shouldn't be surprising.
Posted on June 29, 2006 07:23 AM
Orien,
I played with this myself this week. I entered in the URLs I visited one morning and discovered that I was 83% male--whoops, last I checked I was all girl. Now conversely, a colleague entered his path and discovered he was 51% female. While its a fun tool, I think it's as reliable as reading your horoscope.