Gadgets & Tech

Data and dating

With the rise of social networks and a trend to revealing more than we should about ourselves online, the stigma that used to be attached to online dating websites is fading fast.

In fact, it’s now just as common for singletons to log on to find a partner as it is for them to go to the pub and sheepishly eye someone up in the corner.

When it comes to dating sites, though, it’s not as much about love at first sight but love at first insight – and one website which reckons it has got this nailed is eHarmony.

Founded in 2000 in the US by a marriage councillor who decided to turn his decades of experience with warring couples into a website, eHarmony is well known for its rather laborious sign up process.

This equates to around 250 questions a member needs to answer before they even get a sniff of a date.

It is these questions, though, which act as your very own Cupid, giving the site the data it needs to crunch so that it can match you up to a prospective partner.

"The questionnaire helps us build our psychological profile. This also qualifies upfront the people who are serious and the ones who are less serious," explained Joseph Essas, the head of computational science and technology at eHarmony to TechRadar.

"We then get our members into groups and tell them that this or that group of people fit their profile. This is where the computational science kicks in."

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Long-term love

According to Essas, its members aren’t there for a quick fling – "we don’t allow any searching, the site isn’t a meat market" – eHarmony is strictly for those looking for long-term compatibility and its algorithm can spot these signs that are normally invisible to those who date in the analogue world.

"We help you with the chemistry; we highlight things you have in common," explained Essas. "The only thing that you need to solve for yourself is the physical attraction part."

As well as the mountain of data the site mines from you in its questionnaire, eHarmony also analyses real-life couples who haven’t found love through its own system and uses this data to bolster the information it already has.

"We have a lab where we bring couples to and we track them over time and see what parts of their personality work with each other and what parts don’t," said Essas.

"My team then works with all the data to narrow down the compatibility. We have 40 million people in the database, so with the questions we can narrow this down for members to say 500."

From there, those looking for love can pick and choose the members they feel they will have fun with and take the dating into the real world.

All about the recommendation

If you liked her…

Recommendation engines have become part and parcel with the internet – you only have to go on Amazon once and the site will cater itself to you the next time you log on, offering up goods it believes you will like – but Essas notes that eHarmony’s recommendations are a little different from the norm.

"If you look at other recommendation engines, like the ones used by Netflix and Amazon, they can show you a movie you might like but in our case the movie has to like you back.

"So we can’t just recommend someone to you – it has to go two ways. That’s a challenge, because someone may be perfect for you but you may not be perfect for them."

A cynic would suggest that eHarmony’s long, drawn out process for finding love is all there to keep people as members of the site for as long as possible – you pay a monthly fee to be part of it – but Essas believes that it takes shorter than you think to find love online.

"We just finished a study of 8,000 couples that were picked out of our pool of successful couples and we analysed their patterns and how they got to the point they did. And we found it takes about a month before you find someone to go on a long term date with," said Essas.

"And it takes about five to six two-way interactions with people before you have a date that could go long term.

"We did this study as we wanted to understand how people use the site. We found it takes time but it was eye-opening how fast it was. I expected it to take a lot longer."

The love network

As eHarmony has been around for 12 years, the site has survived through massive changes on the web. Now social networks rule the roost, something you would assume would take people away from dating sites but Essas doesn’t think this is the case.

"Social networks and dating is a tricky proposition. People tend to try and keep their dating activity out of the social graph.

"If your friends see you go on one date and that goes nowhere, then another and then another… suddenly you are seen as a loser.

"People try and keep them separate. In general social networks are a self promotion tool. You usually post things that make you look good and not really things that make you look bad.

"When you sign up to eHarmony your whole social graph doesn’t know – that would be creepy."

Essas also believes that dating sites like eHarmony are relief from today’s ‘open’ web, where people post more about themselves online than they ever have.

Given that when signing up to eHarmony you have to reveal more about yourself than you have to even your closest friends, this is a interesting way to look at it but Essas believes it all has to do with the sensitivity of finding love.

"Even if privacy is disappearing on the web, it is a feature people cherish a lot more in the dating world," said Essas.

"If you dig deeper into demographics, the much younger they are, they find privacy isn’t important. When you get older you realise that what you put online matters – when you go for a job and your potential boss checks you Facebook and sees your drunken images, it’s not exactly going to go in your favour.

"In dating you deal with people’s feelings, emotions – occasionally their heartbreaks. And people are a lot more protective of that."

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Tags: Data, dating, digital, help, Interview, love