The word online dating currently has quite a dodgy reputation. However, dating a complete stranger is not something new. It has been around in the form of meeting someone via a friend’s circle, reference, blind dates, and arranged marriages. After all, we all were strangers to each other at some point in time. Nevertheless, the fact that online dating sites or apps match partners with similar interests so efficiently just amazes a lot of people. So one must wonder, how do online dating sites work? How can they so efficiently match partners and help people find ‘the one.’ This is because online dating sites don’t leave getting a perfect match to fate, they rely on data analytics and algorithms to spread happiness across the world. So how can technology really build someone’s love life?
How do Online Dating Sites Work?
Using Personality Traits to Match
One of the leading online dating site and app OkCupid learns whenever members answer questions that pertain to their personality and lifestyle. It determines how members would like their potential partner to respond and how significant the question is to them. For instance, the importance of race or religion may be crucial to some, but insignificant to others. With over 7 million active users in OkCupid, users have answered over 3000 questions, which assists predictive models to glean information from users’ profiles and match them with their perfect mate. The data analytics tools that drive such online dating sites are so powerful that it can take 13 billion seeks relating to users’ profiles in order to load a page of results.
Contact our analytics experts to know more about how online dating sites work, and how they use data analytics and predictive models to find the perfect soulmate.
Likeliness and Popularity Scores
The leading online dating app Tinder uses likeliness and popularity score to show users the best match. Each profile or person will have a popularity score ranging from 1-10. The app thereby shows a profile that is rated eight other profiles that are similarly ranked. For instance, a new profile is shown to selected few users, if users who have a higher likeliness score like the profile then their ratings increase. Otherwise, they are matched against people with a lower score to determine the actual rating.
Personal Characteristics
In the world of dating and relationships, individual characteristics can matter a lot. For instance, for some people complexion, height, and age matters a lot, and thereby the matching algorithms show matches that comply with users’ preferred range. However, for others, race, religion, nationality, food preference, and work matters. So people lookout for partners in that specific category, and online dating sites and apps can easily present such matches before them.
Behavioral Data
Similar to the movie recommendation engine of Netflix and the product recommendation engine of Amazon, online dating sites know if you like a person, you might also like another that is similar. But of course, they must also like you back, so dating apps take the match from both sides before any communication can start. Dating companies are focusing on facial recognition as people are drawn to certain facial characteristics and features. This way they can better match people by learning what kind of facial feature users prefer and match them to people they would like.
Social Media Monitoring
A lot can be said about a particular person based on his Facebook profile and the kind of post they share. Online dating sites curate user data from different social sites and analyze profile pictures, page likes, and movies, books, and music preferences to make match predictions.