According to recent surveys, more than 40 million single people out of 54 million singles in the US use online dating sites. In the UK, 9.1 million people have used an online dating site and one in every five new committed relationships starts online.
With more users, comes greater demand for these sites to match the right people together. The Conversation online journal posted a study of the the behavior of 200,000 people on one Chinese dating site with more than 60 million registered users. The researchers found out that people are in many ways predictable in their dating habits but they also often bend their own rules.
Not that picky
Online dating site users usually specify what kind of partner they are looking for, but they don’t actually stick as rigorously to their preferences as they might have thought they would though.
The research showed that 70% of the messages sent by women and 55% of those sent by men were to communicate with people who did not meet their original criteria. Women, it seems, are more flexible than men about matching people to their criteria.
Living up to stereotypes
Female users of online dating sites often bemoan the fact that men look for younger dates and men criticize women for being too concerned by money and education. And the results of the research show users living up to these stereotypes.
Profile photos affect men and women differently too. While women with a larger number of photos are more likely to get many messages, the number of photos on a man’s profile has little bearing on the number of contacts or replies he receives.
Predictable behavior
Dating sites can track your behavior and predict which dates might be right for you, possibly even better than you can. It’s possible to predict whether a user would reply to another’s initial contact message with 75% accuracy using factors such as a user’s age, height, location, income and education level as well as their activity, popularity on the site and their similarity with other users in terms of taste and attractiveness to others.
Romance by numbers
Internet dating is not like a recommendation on a shopping site. To suggest a book to a customer based on their previous purchases is a single directional process but a dating site needs to match users who might have a mutual interest in each other so they are more likely to hit it off.
Internet dating sites use collaborative filtering as the best option for matching users according to content-based algorithms, which are based on factors that include a user’s age, education and income – and another, collaborative filtering-style algorithm, which is based on prior communications: both of the user and of other users with similar interests and attractiveness. Collaborative filtering algorithms not only learn the preferences of an online dater but also take information from the behavior of other similar users.