Find Your Dog

What is this?

A dog breed matcher built on real data. Answer eight questions about your lifestyle — the algorithm scores every breed in the dataset and returns your top three matches. You can also browse all breeds directly.

Data sources

Breed scores come from VildMedPap/dogbreeds on GitHub, scraped from dogtime.com. Each breed is rated 1–5 on 30+ dimensions covering temperament, health, trainability, and lifestyle fit.

Breed descriptions and photos are sourced from the Wikipedia REST API.

How the matching works

Your answers map to eight dimensions. Each has a weight reflecting how much it matters when choosing a dog:

Dimension	Weight	Why
Experience needed	×3.0	Wrong match here is the most common reason dogs are rehomed
Good with children	×2.0	High stakes — a mismatch can be dangerous. Asymmetric penalty handles the risk direction.
Tolerates being alone	×2.0	One of the most common rehoming reasons — separation anxiety is serious
Health needs	×1.5	Affects cost and emotional toll long-term
Affection	×1.5	Strong mismatch in either direction causes frustration
Apartment friendly	×1.5	A breed that needs space will suffer in a small flat
Energy	×1.5	A high-energy dog in the wrong home destroys furniture and develops stress behaviors
Shedding	×1.0	Lifestyle preference — important, but not existential

Per dimension, similarity between your answer $u$ and the breed's score $b$ :

sim (b, u) = 1 - {(\frac{| b - u |}{4})}^{2}

Small mismatches are forgiven; large mismatches drop sharply. Seven of the eight dimensions also apply a directional scale factor $s$ before squaring — penalising the dangerous mismatch direction harder:

{sim}_{asym} (b, u) = 1 - {(s \cdot \frac{| b - u |}{4})}^{2}

Example: an under-exercised dog ( $b > u$ on energy) uses $s = 1.5$ , while an over-exercised owner uses $s = 0.6$ .

The final score is the weighted average across all eight dimensions:

score = \frac{\sum_{i} w_{i} \cdot sim (b_{i}, u_{i})}{\sum_{i} w_{i}}

Breeds requiring more experience than you indicated are excluded before scoring.

Example

User: first-time owner, apartment, calm lifestyle. Three dimensions shown for brevity.

Dimension	w	Your u	Breed b	sim(b, u)	w · sim
Experience	3.0	2	2	1 − 0/4 = 1.00	3.00
Apartment friendly	1.5	5	3	1 − (0.5·1.6)² = 0.36	0.54
Energy	1.5	2	3	1 − (0.25·1.5)² = 0.86	1.29
4.83 / 6.0 =					81%

Limitations

Breed scores are generalizations. Individual dogs vary enormously based on upbringing, training, and environment. Use this as a starting point — always meet a dog before committing.

Tune the model

Adjust how much each factor matters to you before running the quiz. Settings are saved and applied automatically.