
Inside Match.com: It's All About the Algorithm - blatherard
http://www.slate.com/id/2300430/
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dirtae
Excellent PR work by Match.com. Anyone who has actually used Match.com knows
that it is, from an engineering and design standpoint, utter crap. The
algorithm being pumped here is probably nothing special, but hey, getting PR
by hyping your "proprietary algorithm" is a time-tested tactic.

<http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

Similar article from 2008:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/science/29tier.html>

Similar article from 2003:
[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2003/08/01/346313/index.htm)

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cowboyhero
Two interesting things the articles blows right past:

\- That they compare their algo to the ones used by Amazon and Netflix to
recommend products, while ignoring that products have much better defined
boundaries than people do. (And ignoring how both Amazon and Netflix suffered
through some horribly bad recommendations in both their systems, early on).

\- That they think Facebook (or any big social network) complements them,
instead of rendering them irrelevant.

A dating service built on a matching you to real world friends-of-friends-of-
friends has a much better chance at success than Match.com's "People who dated
Alice also dated Mary, Jill, and Bertha. Sign up now for 1-Click Dating!"

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ig1
It's not like people haven't tried to build the later, but none of them have
succeeded, which suggests that you're mistaken...

I'm guessing because people actually meet their real life friends-of-friends
at parties, etc. anyway and haven't met anyone from that pool of people who
they want to date.

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sneak
For bonus points, throw on a copy of Kraftwerk's /Computer Love/ (1981!) while
reading the article.

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BasDirks
I prefer Daft Punk's Digital Love personally : ))

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Shenglong
Bravo! Fantastic illustration of how dating sites are broken.

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oceanician
Let's fix them?

Competitive. Yes. But, their may be a model for a small annual subscription
instead of the quite high current monthly subscription model.

How about $20 per year? £10 I'm thinking - I live in the UK.

okcupid/pof are great, but well... not that great. Paid means you just have
the people taking it seriously, and you can validate who people are. But no
need to take all there money that could be spent on going out on dates ...

My 2p.

Any other rails coders fancy helping out?

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Joakal
Monthly is better than annual for one reason: People over-estimate that
they'll get a date so they'll avoid annual unless you offer something very
compelling beyond trying to get a relationship on the website. eg person will
hang around to chat to friends or do quizes.

If you really want to create a dating website, you have these classic
problems:

1) Abundant men. eg spam 100 women a day over several accounts until they get
a response.

2) High turnover. Got a date? Great, they're not coming back. Your email gets
quickly marked as spam. Among other issues.

3) Over-estimation. People don't say their true height, weight or even show
the correct pictures.

4) Chicken and egg problem. The biggest hurdle to overcome first. How you
overcome it will affect the above three.

Have fun!

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oceanician
1) Ok, so let's say, you get ratio the number of men to no more than 20% of
the women (overall/in certain geographic areas), and remove inactive profiles
_from search_

2) That's fine - let's go for the low cost end. A fee that's half to 1/3 of
the major sites, but for a whole year. No hassle of remembering to stop the
billing, or checking your bills. Yes, this will mean after a year, you're
likely to loose a high % due to not rebilling...but hey maybe this is a great
product?

3) Fuzzy matching? i.e. I would like to meet someone <around> my height, or
meet someone <slightly shorter> than my height. Perhaps we could have a
feedback mechanism for those that actually meet. Perhaps we could just remove
those people that never meet up with anyone? (Shocking approach I know - but
the quality of the user experience would drastically improve!!)

4) Build it and they will come. (errm word play. bad)

But no seriously, whilst it's a competitive market, if you match up someone,
and don't rip them off in the mean time, why on earth wouldn't they tell their
single mates about the site? It's all about good user experience, which is
sadly lacking in the majorly exploitative dating site game.

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Joakal
1) Men are very aggressive, I would assume it needs to be something like 1:1.5
men:women ratio. But I do not have statistics.

2) Try it out with some market research!

3) Any sort of matching is going to fail if the data is not reliable. If I
truthfully put 1.8m. Someone puts 1.9m when they're 1.7m. How do you determine
that my input is true? Especially that since due to OkCupid, everyone is now
automatically assuming the person is actually ~0.2m shorter. So if you put me
and the other person together. The 1.9m person wins?

4) I can't tell if you have a plan for this. But a website that depends on a
feedback loop seriously needs to overcome it somehow. Even PlentyOfFish for
all the errors when I registered, I still tried to use it.

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oceanician
4) Start in a small geographical area. A city. On the basis that most people
are looking for a date close to them. Saw within 20 miles? Get it right there,
then move to the next few closest cities. Use geographically targetted
advertising for this - facebook perhaps, for online. Local papers could work
for offline....or even maybe LoveFilm subscription drop-in-fliers?

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teyc
interesting because it models the likelihood someone is going to reject a
suggested person after the first few didn't work out.

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georgieporgie
This is recycled spam.

If you want the reality of online dating, look for the OKCupid blog post about
how you're statistically more likely to find a partner and get married by
_not_ using online dating. Takeaway: men outnumber women, women are
overwhelmed, men get no responses and become increasingly desperate. Of
course, after Match.com bought OKCupid, the blog post was removed.

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SafdarIqbal
Is this the one?
[http://web.archive.org/web/20101006104124/http://blog.okcupi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20101006104124/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-
you-should-never-pay-for-online-dating/)

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georgieporgie
Yes, exactly!

