Contributed by: Jet on Wednesday, June 30 2010 @ 05:30 pm
Last modified on
If you live in a highly-populated area, online dating sites can occasionally provide quite a bit of frustration when it comes to zeroing in on likely matches.
Your city (or metropolitan area) has no shortage of potential candidates, but none of them seem to have anything in common. Most of the options designed to narrow the search are actually areas in which you'd like to keep an open mind, like body type and height. You're not looking for someone with a specific look – you're looking for a specific personality.
This is where keyword searches can come in handy. Most of the time people use keyword searches solely to find something in common, but that can be like searching for a needle in a haystack – what are the odds of every compatible person listing the same obscure movie as their favorite? However, with a little bit of research, you can use the keyword search to look for various kinds of people.
Let's imagine a woman in her mid-thirties. She's a little bold, a little dramatic, and pretty independent. She's a fan of movies like Star Wars, but it might not occur to her to list it. She loves wit and sarcasm mixed with her horror. She hasn't been living in a bubble for the last fifteen years.
Chances are, she's a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Now, you might be a man who would not list Buffy as one of your own favorites, but you know the women you've gotten along with in the past have all loved it. So why not do a keyword search for Buffy? Chances are, you'll find a higher ratio of compatible women than if you'd started wading through everything in a given age range.
The key to doing a keyword search is keeping the keywords broad and popular. The TV show I mentioned was incredibly popular, and lasted several years – one of those generation-definers. It's possible to be either too broad or too specific. If you're a female sports buff, listing a specific sport – basketball – is more useful than the ultra-general word “sports.” However, getting too specific - “Detroit Pistons,” when you live in LA – could limit the search unnecessarily.
If you feel like you've hit a wall in your searches, why not play around with the keyword search function? Leave all other search ranges as broad as possible. You may come up with a pleasant surprise.