Matching

A yet to be released study from a Duke University researcher, analyzed 22,000 online daters and confirmed what the rest of us already know. Men prefer thin women and, women prefer tall financially secure men. I think what will be interesting about this study is the little details. Some reported examples of this in the study include, men prefer women with a body mass index of 18 or 19. This is on the very thin side since a women who is 5' 6" would need to weight about 115 pounds (I think women can blame the runway models for this). For the men, on average a guy who is 5' 9" needs to make $30,000 more than a man who is 5'10", just to be as successful with online dating.

We will report more interesting facts on this online dating study when it is released.

Since I first tried online dating over seven years ago, the sites have gotten a lot more sophisticated. There’s so much functionality and service built-in on the more popular sites that you can’t help it but to be impressed by the concierge-type service you receive.

I really enjoy Match.com’s Daily 5 concept. Each day when you log in for the first time, they’ve got 5 brand-new matches ready and waiting for you in your Connections. While they won’t always tickle your fancy, it’s great that they make the searching easier by bringing potential matches to you.

It seems that I get anywhere from five to ten new “you’ve caught his attention” notifications from Match each day. This is where you click “I’m Interested” on a particular profile in your Daily 5. But I’m telling ya: that doesn’t do me any good. It’s great that you’re interested, but it doesn’t tell me anything about YOU. So here are a few tips to make you Daily 5 on Match.com work better for you (and the people you express an interest in!).

While I think genetic testing can reveal biological compatibility, I do have problems recommending it as your sole source of information about your matches. Personality and your own likes and dislikes play a major role in matchmaking. Plus, all of the DNA testing dating sites memberships are too small to really be able to generate high quality matches for someone.

It looks like that one of the first dating sites we talked about which does DNA matchmaking, ScientificMatch.com, is planning to phase out the dating part of the site and concentrate on matchmakers and couples. I think that is a good idea for Scientific Match as their price tag of $995 was just too steep for them ever to gain any traction as a dating site. See this Story for more details on ScientificMatch.com.

Another genetic testing dating service we talked about was GenePartner. Back in the beginning of June they had run tests on 500 people, now after 5 months, they have doubled the number to 1000. This is still not a lot of people but it is the only DNA matching company to specify any numbers. Another advantage of GenePartner is they are much cheaper than other similar services. They only charge $99. GenePartner have also recently partnered with a dating site called Sense2Love.com (which is expected to open next month) to offer their service as an add-on to the regular dating site's service. I think partnering with other dating sites like this, is the only way for DNA matchmaking companies to be able to create a member database large enough to generate quality matches for singles. For more on GenePartner and how their service works, read this Story.

The one other thing I have problems with these type of matching sites is I would never really want to give up my DNA to them. You would never know if your DNA could ever fall into the wrong hands (like your insurance company).

Online Dating in the UK is booming. Last year more than five million adults in the UK used the internet to find their partner and the money these online daters spent on dating sites was over £80 million. Now days, one in five people who marry, met that person online. By next year (2010) it is estimated that there will be 16 million singles in the UK, which means there is only room for online dating to grow.

One segment of the dating industry which is becoming more popular are services that offer psychological questionnaires. Dating sites like Match.com UK, Chemistry (North America), DatingDirect.com and eHarmony all offer services that use science to determine matches. Each of these sites will ask you dozens (or hundreds) of questions on your values, attitudes, emotions and personality traits. These questions help the dating site to scientifically analyze how you interpret situations, how you react to problems and how you make decisions. With this information in hand the service then pairs you with potential partners who you should be highly compatible with. This goes beyond love at first sight.

But where did psychometric testing come from?

Developed in the early 20th century by scientists, these tests are detailed questions assessing your intellect, personality traits and knowledge. They were used to recruit spies by the British during World War II and were then later taken up by the CIA.

In the Sixties, Professor Raymond Cattell invented questionnaires that looked at a range of personality traits in the workplace. The Civil Service still uses the system today both in recruiting and to help its managers find the best way to manage their staff according to their psychometric profiles.

Psychometric testing does work but it is still only part of the matching process. People need to be honest with themselves about who they are or they are not going to get real compatible matches from these sites. Members also need to realize that what their perceived ideal match may be, it may not be what the science of matching has found to be the most highly compatible with their personality type. Members of these dating sites need to take a chance and go into online dating with an open mind.

For more on the story, read the Mail Online. To find further details about the dating sites mentioned in this story which offer psychometric assessments, read our Match.com UK review, Chemistry review, DatingDirect.com review and eHarmony review.

OkTrends recently took a look at how religion and race affects online matching. This is a summary of what they found based a random pool of 500,000 members:

• The Zodiac Sign - Statistically makes no difference. It doesn't matter if you are a Leo and female, the person you end up with has an equal chance of being any of the twelve Zodiac signs.
• Match By Religion - Agnostics and Jews get along better with most other religion groups while Muslims and Hindu men tend to be the most choosey.
• Match By Religious Attitude - It doesn't seem to matter how serious someone is about their religion. You have an almost equal chance of liking someone who doesn't take it too serious.
• Match By Race - Surprisingly there is nothing dramatic here. The overall compatibility of all races is pretty even.

For a more detailed explanation on how race and religion effect matching, read oktrends and to find out more information about this dating site read our review of OkCupid.

To power their complex matching algorithms, eHarmony relies on four database and data warehousing products.

• The very popular and open source MySQL database server.
• Oracle Database.
• Data warehousing appliances from Netezza Inc.
• Hadoop, a open source data crunching application which divides work among a large number of computers.

eHarmony uses Orcale to do the initial matching after a new member signs up. For the behind the scenes processing, eHarmony uses a 50 node Hadoop cluster. Since moving to Hadoop, eHarmony has seen 4 to 6 times sped improvement in how long it takes to perform matching calculations on a large scale.

All this technology is controlled by eHarmony's main technical team, which includes 40 engineers based at the Los Angeles headquarters. eHarmony also has hired a number of development firms throughout Europe, which has doubled the number of engineers working for them.

To find out more about the technology that powers eHarmony, read ComputerWorld. For more on the dating site itself, check out some of our reviews of eHarmony.