Dylan Hunter

I actually worked on something similar a bunch of years ago, at the time more oriented toward personalization of search results, but, if anything, the threshold of how good you have to be on to make it worthwhile should definitely be lower in an ad context, so should be a good feature when they launch, (presuming they actually do it well, which, unfortunately, MSN Search does not raise great faith in - perhaps their folks in Beijing will be better at! ).

Is hardly iron-hard, but you definitely can predict several demographic components by how people express the same / similar ideas, at least good enough to try using as ad segmentation technique, and then as long as you can keep pushing the acquisition needle further over, you keep investing!

“Microsoft Corp may soon be able to tell whether an Internet search query comes from a man or a woman.

“…’There’s a confidence interval around one’s gender,’ [Jed] Nahum said in a telephone interview. ‘Advertisers can start to tailor their message based on those estimates. Using the new technology, Microsoft will be able to tell, for example, that someone searching for the term `Dodge Caravan’ is more likely to be female than someone searching for `Dodge’ alone.’”

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