Origins of the Geek Test and innergeek.us

Hi, my name is Yvette Beaudoin. I'm the one responsible for the Geek Test and this site, though many friends have influenced me along the way.

It all started in August of 1999 while I was dating my now-husband Ben. My two roommates at Miami University of Ohio were also dating geeks; we decided that men had to have a thin layer of geekiness to be worth our time. The next weekend, Ben and I were enjoying caffeinated beverages at Maxwell's Coffee House near the University of Toledo where, in his words, he was "learning how to be an engri-neer". What a geek! I told him about our decision, and he was worried that he didn't qualify. I assured him he did, but he needed a way to quantify his geekiness... so we started listing all the things that made him geeky. Then we started to list other (more dysfunctional) geeky qualities that he (thankfully) did not have. For the most part. The ideas were all written on a paper napkin, of course.

I took the napkin back to my roommates for their approval. I transcribed the scrawl on the napkin into a Word document entitled, "Take the Geek Test." We had a great idea for a party.

The first official Geek Test started out as a 100-point questionnaire to qualify attendees at my Geek Party in October 1999, co-hosted by my geeky roommates. The party was our proactive response to being geeks at the ultra-mainstream Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It became clear that more detail on the test was needed, and we pooled the diverse geek talents of our friends together to create a bigger test... 280 questions. Geek Party 2.0 was held in December 2001, complete with a Geek Gift Exchange. Still, the test was not complete. It continued to grow in its original format as a Word document, and wasted a lot of trees.

By this time, I was done with college and looking for something else to occupy my time. "How can I make the geek test accessible to more people, and get rid of the manual addition required for the final score?" I wondered. Naturally, I needed to convert the test to HTML with a javascript that would do the math. But then what would I do with it? I needed a website. Sure, I could have settled for a free site, but I hate, really hate, intrusive pop-up ads. I have a job, so why not have my own website specifically for the test? And maybe other stuff if I need it? I planned the release of the HTML version to coincide with Geek Party 3.0 on February 1, 2003.

Well, here's that site. I never imagined that one little post on a forum in April 2003, after most of my friends had taken the test and passed it on, would generate the exponential popularity of the site... the test itself went from 287 views on April 6, 2003 to 13,230 on May 6, 2003. For one little site that wasn't listed in any search engines, that's not too bad! As of July 21, 2004, the geek test has had almost 2 million hits! Someone at Google must have liked it, too, because now it is the first site listed when a search is done for "geek test." Google rocks! So does everyone who likes the test! Oh yeah, and while all of that was going on, I married the man who took me to Maxwell's. :)

An updated version of the test is always in the works, and the easiest way to find out about it is to read my blog.

If you have a specific inquiry, have suggestions for the next version of the test, or would like to feature my site in print or online, please contact me.