Online dating

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Online dating is an internet service that attempts to match couples using a system in which individuals can choose their partners according to such preferences as age, location and race. It is one of the most popular paid services on the Internet.

Upon joining the dating service, the users answer questions from a mandatory survey and create “profiles” of themselves. Such a profile is a webpage that provides information about a user and can be viewed by the other members of the dating service. The users indicate various demographic, socioeconomic, and physical characteristics, such as their age, gender, education level, height, weight, eye and hair color, and income. The users also answer a question on why they joined the service, for example to find a partner for a long- term relationship, or, alternatively, a partner for a “casual” relationship. In addition, the users provide information that relates to their personality, life-style, or views.

With hundreds of millions of members, Internet dating earns greater revenues than any other online subscription service. One study showed that eHarmony alone accounted for 2% of US marriages in a year, that is, 120 marriages per day.

Matrimonials is an ancillary concept applied mostly to international sites, with significantly more determined ends. It is interesting to view how cultures with perhaps traditional views on marriage employ non-traditional technology to facilitate it.

History

Dating has changed drastically since its inception. It once consisted of first date proposals and fathers making deals with other fathers about whom their daughters will marry. But recently, in the past three decades, dating has become more of a process; during this process daters weed out people who they feel aren’t marriage potential even if the discarded numbers are large. Even more recently, the combination of these generational changes resulted in one type of service that caters to all types of daters, the Internet dating service. The first online dating service (www.Match.com) was created in 1995 and, as of 2002, has had 27 million people registered. The services were initially very simple and only matched people based on profiles of likes and dislikes but now many dating services have evolved, having specific requirements for memberships. For example, www.stdmatch.net is an online dating service that caters specifically to STD-infected users and requires a specification of the STD when setting up a personal profile on the site. In America alone thousands of Internet dating services exist and all of them have the same purpose, to give everyone in the world the freedom and flexibility to date who they want and when they want.

In August 2003 alone, 40 million unique users visited online dating sites in the United States alone, according to U.S. News & World Report -- that's about half the number of single adults in the U.S. Given their prevalence, it seems likely that online dating systems have begun to influence not only individual lives but also cultural notions of love and attraction with their overflowing catalogues of potential partners and their sometimes idiosyncratic choices of personal characteristics to highlight.

Algorithm

Online dating has turned searching for possible partners similar to other e-commerce websites, like online shopping. To enable this, many different algorithms have been created. Each online dating company boast about their superior technology to show and create better matches. All possible approaches incorporating psychological to mathematical theories have been used.

Though each company may take a different approach, matching personalities is broadly divided into three stages which all companies use:

• Collection of User Information
• Matching Users
• Communication between Users .

Collection of User Information

This step starts the very moment a person joins an online dating service. Some people don’t use online dating services for this very step of sharing private information about themselves. The data collected are basically of two types: characteristics data and criteria data.. Characteristic data essentially describes the user; while the criteria data is what the user expects out of a possible partner.

Services collect data via various types of questions. There are some direct fundamental ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions. Some ranking questions, where a user must rank various choices according to his preferences. Some questions where a user is given two possible extremes and he/she may choose anywhere between one extreme to the other and indirect questions which calculate the compatibility of a person. There are also options for users to ask their own constructed questions and also define themselves.

Once all this data is collected it has to be converted using mathematics to allow various algorithms to match people.

Matching Users

The most basic matching is done by the users themselves, when they search the database manually. This gives a lot of control to the user but it is tedious. So to do this automatically, all the responses of the users are converted into compatibility scores (which is relative strength of each match) to mathematically match people. Services look for both complementing and similarity between users to be matched.

All dating services claim trade secrecy of their particular matching algorithm. However, all matching consists of these vital steps that all the services incorporate. Firstly, the data is saved into the data base and converted to numerical scores. Compatibility scores are then calculated. A range is then formed around a person’s compatibility scores to see which other users fall into his/her range. If a person is easy going then his range will generally be higher than a difficult person. If there is very less people in someone’s compatibility range, then they may be asked to change some answers to questions from the previous ‘user information collection’ stage to get a higher volume of possible matches.

During this phase mathematical correlation is used too. Various types of factor analysis are also done. All characteristic and criteria data are considered factors. All factors are given different mathematical values and then depending on how important that particular factor is for the user, it is multiplied by a weight.

Once potential matches are listed, communication between users is facilitated.

Communication between Users

Communication is started at a maximum privacy-protected stage or communication level. The users sometimes don’t even reveal their names. Pseudonyms are regularly used. Instant messaging, emails, private voice messages, etc. are the commonly used tools for communication. Once the users show enough attraction to each other, they enter another level of communication where they reveal more of themselves. This process of communicating at different levels continues till at a very close level of communication the users decide to meet. At any communication level users may also decide to end contact if they please.