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Personas Reveals What the Web Thinks of You (Results May Vary)

by Warren Riddle on August 23, 2009 at 10:34 AM


Pretty much everyone, at some point, has googled their own name just to see what might pop up. To further that natural desire to know what's associated with your name on the Net, a group of MIT tech pedants, led by Aaron Zinman, has launched Personas. After entering your name, the program, which creates a personal online data portrait, "scours the Web for information and attempts to characterize" your Web identity.

Performing a strict scientific inquiry in order to determine the accuracy of the program (and definitely not out of sheer narcissism), we gave Personas a trial run. Two text results immediately pop up. The first reads, "The applicant, Warren Riddle is seeking hydraulic project approval for the construction of two foot bridges across a stream known as Deadman's Creek." Hmm. That can't be right. The second result claims that, "Warren Riddle is a complete moron." Dang, MIT. Now that's just mean, even if it is accurate.

The final reading, which resembles a bar graph, supposedly presents a "seemingly authoritative personal profile" based on "an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data." Yeah, they're really smart. This result claims that "Warren Riddle" is predominately associated with the world of "fashion." Wait, what? Ok, that is not cool Zinman. This is just getting embarrassing.

[Ed. note: After test-driving Personas several more times, we concluded that -- while it is a cool idea -- it still needs some serious mechanical work. Three consecutive searches, for each of two different names, all yielded different results.] [From: Personas and Swiss-Miss]

Tags: Aaron Zinman, AaronZinman, MIT, Personas, search engines, SearchEngines, top

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