I bet you could find statistical significance in just about any type of matching with a big enough sample size. It’s probably at least as significant as the weather on the first date. If it were me, I’d try my luck with photos on plenty of fish, or something I could have fun with like OkCupid.

Some people like scientific tests, others like quizzes, there is room in the market for both.

I don’t see OkCupid as serious Eharmony competition, especially given the demographics of the site, but all dating sites don’t have to be for serious singles.

Tickle was an early test-taking site, and was snapped up by Monster for more than $30 million. Obviously people like tests and companies see the value of the test-taking community.

I like that the OkCupid questions are generated by users, sites with a dynamic component are much more compelling. The dynamic features will no doubt change over time.

It seems that games from companies like Bunchball are the next interactive feature for dating sites. Agree or disagree?

1) The selection of the questions
2) The algorithm used to turn responses into compatibility scores

As to the selection of questions, we called out a couple of eHarmony’s questions (“I feel unable to deal with thingsâ€? or “I am easily discouragedâ€?) not because they are negative personality traits but because we doubt their ability to predict compatibility.

Let’s look to the tried-and-true world of offline dating for an analogy. Imagine that a friend of yours wanted to set you up on a blind date. You’re not quite sure you trust your buddy enough to agree, so he offers to answer a few questions about her to help you make up your mind. Are you going to ask “Does she feel able to deal with things?” or “Is she easily discouraged?”? I think not. In the real world, people ask questions like: “Does she smoke?” “Is she in to hip-hop music?” “Does she want to settle down and have kids?” It’s not that any of these are positive or negative — it’s these questions, and their answers, have predictive value.

So, whereas a site like eHarmony relies on its psychologists to generate questions they believe are important, we turn to our users — the daters — to tell us what questions they would ask potential dates before accepting a date. And they’ve replied by suggesting over ten thousand questions. After removing redundent, ambiguous, or otherwise poorly designed questions, we have an active database of about 3,000 questions.

Each of these 3,000 questions (to which we have 200,000,000 answers) takes roughly the same form:

- Question Stem
- Your answer to the question
- The answer(s) you’d most like your ideal match to have selected
- Your weighting how important this question is

So, consider the following question:

Do you smoke?

a) Yes, regularly
b) Yes, but only socially
c) No

Now, I might be a smoker trying to quit, in which I would answer (a) but might seek someone who answered (b) or (c). I might be a non-smoker who is completely intolerant of smokers, so I would answer (c) and seek (c). Or I might be an open-minded non-smoker and answer (c) but seek any of the above. So it’s not enough to simply know someone’s answer.

Dave, you asked whether we match tennis players or animal lovers, but that’s a question you’d have to ask a site like eHarmony which has a “special sauce” to determine that two animal lovers make a good pair but that two tennis players won’t. We empower users to express their own preferences.

The third part of the question is the weighting, another element missing from the eHarmony model. It’s exceedingly obvious that some people care a lot about religion while others care more about smoking. I, for one, am allergic to cats, so that’s a bigger deal-breaker than either God or cigarettes. The OkCupid system allows all of those subtleties to come out.

On to the algorithm for determining compatibility. eHarmony relies on psychologists to know whether someone who “feels unable to deal with things” should be matched with someone who “is easily discouraged.” OkCupid takes a much simpler approach. Users tell us tons of information about themselves and tons of information about what they’re looking for.

We then run unbiased, impartial, hands-off mathemative algorithms to determine which pairs of people have the highest cross-compatibility. That is, how well did person A satisfy what person B is looking for and how well did person B satisfy what person A is looking for? See, we’re not promising soulmates, which intuitively seems impossible to do, anyway.

We’re simply saying that we’re going to rank order the database by how compatible the other members are with you. By no means to we suggest that your #1 match on OkCupid is your soulmate. Instead we suggest that pool of people with, say, 70%+ matches is going to be much more fruitful for you than the pool of people below 30%.

If you really want to get a feel for our matching algorithm, answer about 50 questions (the average user answers about 200) and then, instead of sorting by match percentage, sort by ENEMY percentage. Yes, this is a light-hearted tool, but people tend to more easily identify things/people they dislike than those they like. My guess is that you’ll be very happy not to come across those profiles.

Fundamentally, there is a philosophical question that differentiates OkCupid from eHarmony. Why do people use online dating sites? Is it (a) they don’t know what they’re looking for and they want someone to tell them or (b) they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for and they want an environment where they can look through a much larger group of people?

eHarmony clearly believes (A). OkCupid believes (B).