Match.com launched in 1995, and the site's popularity is still on the rise. In the highly competitive world of online dating, Match.com consistently ranks highly in dater's minds, and for good reason: their trailblazing technology makes them a cut above the rest.
Codenamed "Synapse," Match's algorithm evaluates a diverse range of factors in order to match compatible singles. David Gelles recently took a look backstage at Match.com for FT Magazine, guided by Mandy Ginsberg, president of Match.com US, and Amarnath Thombre, a key engineer for the company, to discover exactly what makes the Match algorithm so special.
Ginsberg had personal experience with the trials and tribulations of online dating before joining the Match team. After divorcing her spouse shortly after leaving college, she joined JDate but had no luck finding a partner. Love later found her in the form of a co-worker from India, who won her heart despite being vastly different from the man she thought she wanted to marry.
"If I had laid out a criteria for what I was looking for, it would not have been a guy from south India," she told Gelles. "People are complex. You're constantly making trade-offs about who's too tall, too short, too smart and too dumb. People come in and tell us a bit about what they're looking for. But what you say and what you do can be different."
With that idea in mind, known as "dissonance" in academic circles, Ginsberg helped revolutionize Match's approach to online dating. "I might come in and say I'm looking for a nice Catholic guy between 30 and 40 who is non-married," she says. "But after weeks of looking at people, I might get an e-mail from a guy who has kids, and I might accept that." Taking into consideration the fact that most people don't know themselves as well as they think they do, the engineers at Match adapted the algorithm to pair users with potential dates based on a combination of what they say they want and what it seems they actually want based on their actions on the site.
Now, instead of taking user's preferences at face value, Match's cutting-edge technology relies on a variety of factors to match prospective partners. Stated preferences like age range and body type are taken into consideration, while the algorithm augments that information with the knowledge it gains from an intelligent examination of a user's behavior on the site. If a member's actions don't match their stated preferences, Match learns that those preferences are not entirely correct and that the member is open to meeting people who don't fit the original description. Synapse also looks at the behavior of similar users and factors in that information as well, in a process known as "triangulation."
As impressive as Ginsberg's contribution to online dating is, Match's amazing innovations would not be possible without its team of brilliant engineers, like Amarnath Thombre, whose story we'll look at next time.
For more information on this popular dating site you can read our review of Match.com.
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