"Browser History" analyzes your habits, guesses at your gender

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender. Of course the idea is definitely not new, in fact Xerox (of all companies??) has a patent on the whole process and I’m certain plenty of networks already do something of the sort… but what the heck, let’s have some fun!

So what I did is I modified the SocialHistory JS so that it polled the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited. I then apply the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determine a guestimate of your gender...

Mike on Ads: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

Mike's algorithm estimated that there was a 98% chance that I'm male, 2% chance that I'm female.

Not that I'm an effeminate fellow at all :-), but I was surprised that my browsing history indicated only a 2% chance of me having two X chromosomes...

(via Megan McArdle)