Online dating has two major problems. Member inauthenticity and the inability to search across dating sites. Until these issues are addressed, much of the industry will remain stagnant and in many cases continue suffering ongoing declines in traffic, with few exceptions.

Nobody in the dating industry will go near member authenticity except a few brave companies like eHarmony, Mate1 and a few others. Trufina, Backgroundchecks, HonestyOnline and a number of other vendors have had a disheartening experience attempting to bring identity verification and background checks to the online dating market.

Verified profiles = less people on site = less subscription and ad revenue. At least this is the thinking, or should I say fear. This has been tested on several sites and appears to be the case. And yet there is no site with any traction to speak of which employs identity credentials exclusively, which amazes me. It might be that they have trouble raising the millions required for such a site to gain credibility and audience, especially when investors talk to dating site operators who have looked into member authenticity previously.

Singles complain about scammers, spammers and people not being who they thought they were all the time. A solution is delivered on a silver platter and boom, as with so many assumptions we make about human nature, all of a sudden what people say and what they do diverges and we’re left scratching our heads.

Member inauthenticity is going to be around forever, even after the perfect matching system is created and singles suddenly face the awkward reality of extinction.

Ok, enough about trying to solve the impossible. Like most online businesses, the online dating ecosystem is a big sales funnel. Attract, convert, retain, millions of times a day to satiate the never-ending need for fresh profiles.

If dating sites are sales funnels, buying and selling profiles and leads from each other, why can’t we search across them from a single Google-like service?

Google search for online dating is a common subject here. I’ve worked with a number of companies who have not been able to come up with the right mix of vision, capability and resources to make dating meta-search a viable alternative to effectively searching with blinders on.

Not content with being a large network of niche sites (and raising money to acquire more) and a white label dating provider, EasyDate is the latest in a long line of companies to take on the task of creating Google for online dating.

And you know what? EasyDate just might be the company to do it. Disclaimer, I worked with EasyDate last year.

In fact EasyDate has had a search engine running for a while now at Canoodle. Not a lot of traffic but at least it’s up and running. (What was the Spark Networks search engine called?)

The ability for EasyDate to continue to improve Canoodle is not so cut and dried. The business of acquiring the cheapest traffic that converts well is quite different from running a dating meta-search engine. Killer marketing exposure, batch processing of profiles, solid search functionality, seamless transition from search site to destination site, customized billing process and a host of daunting challenges I’ve barely begun to touch upon.

As with Lycos dating search, Spark and others, partnering within their own network of sites is the easiest way to start. If Canoodle wants any chance at success, it will have to watch out out for deals with weak free sites outside of their control. this is what killed off every other meta-search engine in the past. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told this story to dating site executives, only to pick the absolutely worst initial free dating site partners.

The big win is when subscription sites are searched alongside of free sites and potential search filters like profile freshness and other new search parameters are implemented (and not without kicking and screaming from other sites do doubt.) Ask Are You Interested about their short-lived deal with Match on Facebook.

Speaking of Match, I hear things are “very tense” right now and an executive shuffle is in the works.

The reality of dating search is not going to be anywhere near my utopian vision, which I hope at least colors the efforts Canoodle must put into their site if it’s going to make any sort of difference. Such is life. Canoodle is probably going to expose a number of EasyDate sites, maybe one or two trusted external sites and the holy grail is a deal with a big International site willing to risk working with Canoodle. Just getting one big site outside of the EasyDate network could be difficult, but knowing Bill and Max, I’m sure they have something planned to get over this not-insubstantial challenge. These deals take time, and as EasyDate raises money and acquires additional dating sites, it may become easier for competitors to open up and share profiles with Canoodle.

Will Canoodle become the Google of dating? Who knows, but at least they are publicly making an effort. If you run a dating site and want to better understand how Canoodle works and what it takes to participate, contact Canoodle.

Related posts:

1. EU Dating Site Network Easydate Going Public
2. EasyDate to Acquire Allegran Dating Business
3. Can Online Dating Meta-Search Sites Succeed?

Search Engine toolbar Star Position has reached out several times recently. They have a browser toolbar you might have seen advertised on cable networks, supposedly 35 million installs. There is a flat rate of $500 or so for search phrases. The search results get injected at the top of Google and other search engine results. Is this even legal? I would think that if this is a great system for dating sites then people would be all over the opportunity. Does anyone use this company? I’d like to hear your experiences.

Related posts:

1. GooDate personals multi-search engine
2. 7 Predictions for Search Engine Marketing in 2009
3. Customized Dating Search Engine

Today’s guest post is by Scott Valdez, founder of Virtual Dating Assistants.

It is really a privilege to have the opportunity to write a guest post for Online Dating Insider so early into the development of our company. For understandable reasons, we didn’t receive a considerably warm welcome to the market during the week leading up to yesterday’s official launch so it’s nice to be invited to speak out on one of the key sources of industry information and expertise.

In order to improve our chances of getting valuable press coverage, we decided to use a slightly edgy approach to introduce and market a concept that what was already fairly controversial: giving cash-rich, time-poor men the ability to fully outsource their online dating. We thought this would help us really stand out in the market and invoke emotion (positive or negative). Our approach appears to have helped us achieve that objective.

As some of you may have seen, we have been already been covered by VentureBeat (that article was posted on NYTimes.com) and TechCrunch. Further, we are expecting some additional top-tier coverage soon. Quite frankly, we are even surprised ourselves with the attention we have gotten, especially since we appeared on the websites of all three of the aforementioned information sources prior to yesterday’s launch.

In addition to providing us with thousands of dollars in free marketing research in the form of feedback from hundreds of people including some of the industry’s leading opinion leaders such as David Evans and Evan Marc Katz, the attention the publicity brought us will translate into a quick recouping of our initial investment and will help us to raise capital that can be reinvested into improvements in strategic areas, namely marketing and service execution.

Within the next few weeks we plan to create a package offer for a less comprehensive subscription-based solution that we can market to the group of people who have said that they are definitely not comfortable with us interacting on their behalf but would like for someone to help them narrow down the playing field. We have also decided to begin planning a parallel site and set of services designed for women, who have contacted us on a small scale to see if we can help manage their online dating. In addition to the contacts, we have seen a lot of their tweets with a link to our site or an article about us followed by statements like “I need this service too!”

I would like to note that although we do not currently have a women and same-sex friendly site, we will not be rejecting customers based on their sex or sexual preference. We are willing to provide a customized service to fit any client’s needs.

We are excited to have finally taken the plunge. We look forward to serving thousands of singles in the years to come that would like to take advantage of the massive candidate pools in online dating sites but simply don’t have the time to do it themselves.

No related posts.

The Google Blog post Search for “me” on Google caught my attention.

To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. We’ve also added links so it’s easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.

I’m glad to see Google doing this, although the larger issue, at least for me, is the fact that managing multiple profiles across dating sites, social networks and other communities is a PITA. This is why people are excited about Facebook Connect. One repository of our personal information, which can be shared across partner sites at the click of a button. At least that’s the goal, right now Facebook had too tight a grasp on our personal information, there is no exporter for backing up our information, and many other issues to numerous to take on in one blog post.

In coming months we’ll see desktop applications for managing our personal data, better privacy tools and deeper integration with search results like Google. I don’t know who’s going to figure it out first, but the arms race is on.

I’ve advised several companies on how to aggregate online identities with the goal of capturing a person’s focus, intent, habits and personality. This information is gold to marketers (and singles).

Dating companies don’t seem to get this yet. One person, one profile, accessible through multiple sites. It’s going to make billing complicated but it’s a strong possibility for the future of online dating.

Perhaps people will simply meet via Facebook or Google, with Facebook being a much stronger option, as Google has it’s hands full with other things and a 1/2-baked solution is not what singles need.

Whatever happens, it’s exciting to see companies continue to figure out the magic mix of discovery, privacy and communication. Hopefully the online dating industry will take note and begin to adopt some of the standards we’re seeing coming out of social networking sites.

Very exciting times, to say the least. My Google profile is http://www.google.com/profiles/relaxedguy.

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The Google Labs blog talks about Similar Images.

Image Search is a tool you can use to find just about any kind of image, but it can sometimes be difficult to find the right image if you can’t describe it in words. The new Similar Images feature was developed with just this in mind. Using it you can now find images that look like an existing result simply by clicking on a link. Using visual similarity, you don’t have to refine the text of your search, instead, you can just click on the link of an image you like.

I wonder if this functionality could be used for my image search feature for dating sites. You know the one I’ve been talking about, where you are presented with a gallery view of search results and you can click on people you like and the grid will be re-populated with similar-looking users.

Another cool Google Labs tool is News Timeline. Look at the PlentyOfFish timeline I created. Easy and useful, just how I like it.

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Good riddance, tax-man.

Alex at Rubixx says the dating site search aggregator re-launched a few weeks ago. Nice to see some of my ideas show up in the interface. A note for all dating meta-search companies like Rubixx, and Canoodle. Think twice about your initial partners. filling your site with millions of profiles from a site like American Singles, which is basically going out of business, is not the best strategy. Aggregators need to think critically about launching with the most appropriate partners. So far this has not been the case.

Most meta-search companies do straight affiliate deals, none that I know of have what I would consider official partnerships with dating sites. Hopefully this will change and my $30/month will allow me to contact people through dozens of high-quality dating sites.

Canoodle searches 18 dating sites and has 8.5 million profiles. Rubixx has 13 million profiles. Neither mentions exactly sites they index, although Rubixx mentions American Singles in a blog post.

Dating site meta-search is an idea that has been tried again and again and will never take off until the following issues are addressed.

- Quality partners. Most searches span any number of mediocre dating sites. American Singles? Come on.

- Credit-based access. I’m not spending $25 to join an entirely new dating site in order to email a single woman. This is a huge fail point. I should be charged at the most $5 to contact someone.

- Marketing. Most dating search aggregators fail because they are not able to effectively promote the search engine. If you aren’t spending tens of thousands of dollars a month, you’re not going to get enough traction to survive.

- Search functionality and profile display needs to be streamlined. The process is often confusing and people tend to drop out before paying due to being overwhelmed. Match actually did this right with their failed Facebook application, Little Black Book.

- Moving from affiliates to partners. Dating sites need to get better about allowing access to their profiles. XML feeds and nightly batching capabilities are basic building blocks for working with aggregators. Some of the top ten sites have these already (Match and Yahoo).

Dating meta-search will work, but only if site owners spend more time addressing how users search, pay and interact with each other. Until someone nails the business model and user experience, expect to see any number of companies continue to jump into the fray, with limited success.

Related posts:

1. Lycos launching meta-dating site
2. Google-Style Dating Site Search Trumps Niche Sites
3. Search For Dating Sites On Google

Spark Networks has launched Facelink, a meta-search engine which returns online dating profile results from across all Spark properties.

Facelink reminds me of when I went to Lycos a few years ago to discuss their meta-search engine. I told Lycos that their site was destined to fail (it did) and I’m not straying too far from that message after trying out the current version of Facelink.

Network-based meta-search engines don’t work unless significant marketing dollars are redirected to the search engine from other destinations. The service should also work.

Instead, with Facelink, we are left scratching our heads. The user experience is all over the place, every search result is different, some profiles have photos, some don’t, some photos are hidden, some profiles are inactive, very confusing. Some say I need to create an account to view photos (again), yet the next search result doesn’t show that same massage.

Spark runs “over thirty online dating networks”, then why are there only 20 sites (they are not really networks”) included in the search results?

Search is free, you still have to pay to join the site(s) members belong to that you want to contact. Where is the one-pass where you can belong to all sites for 30 days? They should consider rolling that out as a billing feature.

In what particular circumstances would someone want to see search results across religious sites like JDate and Christian Mingle?

Why can’t I filter results by site? Why aren’t the sites a profile is associated with listed in the search results?

Why does the site look and function like it was built in an afternoon?

What is the concept behind “parametric search” and how is it different from regular dating site search?

It’s not revolutionary by any sense of the term, but I do like the free text, once you get the hang of it, wonder how it stacks up against MatchWords in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. I know, let’s have a shootout (not!)

I searched for women ages 31-25 who use the word “biking” in their profile. Of millions of profiles, only 864 mention the word. That can’t be right, can it?

There are 25 women in Boston who use the word restaurant in their profile? Something is seriously wrong with the search algorithm.

Search results are spotty, the lack of simple geographic filtering is a big problem. Women who mention biking in New Jersey show up before women in the Boston area.

Search results don’t display photos! That’s no good, this isn’t Google, show me some faces, and in gallery view, please. When I click through to profiles, most from JDate. To make matters worse, on some profiles I can read the text of the profile but “Only members can see my photos”.

I click on “Email Me” and am sent to registration page that doesn’t explain that I have to register and pay to become a member, before I can even see her photos. Hello user interface person, did they let you into any meetings?

I click on one more text result and am greeted with a mini-version of the profile of a woman with a great smile. I can see her photo, but then we have the signup page below her profile and the alert “You have exceeded the visitor search limit. Please login or register now to continue searching.”

Talk about a site that needs big Beta tag on the home page. Spark Networks spent a lot of money standardizing on a platform to power all 30+ sites, but the system templates and business logic isn’t future-proofed enough to adapt to a meta-search engine.

There are two types of people who will visit Facelink, those that already belong to a Spark Networks property, and those that don’t. Spark spent zero time differentiating the user experience ad marketing copy for each constituency. Actually, there is no marketing copy explaining what is going on. Click and pray.

Why doesn’t spark give you the option to create an account on Facelink?

Why did they bother to create a separate standalone site? How are they going to promote it?

My grade: C-, Facelink needs a lot of work to be even remotely interesting and useful.

Here’s the Facelink press release.

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Back from a few days on Nantucket. I feel like I’ve been away for a month. Next week I’m taking a few days off as well, need to get in some summertime fun while it lasts.

ReadWriteWeb says:

More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to navigate using the address bar instead of the search bar – what would happen to the search economy and innovation online?

Follow the link to see dating search terms, from Hitwise. Turns out browser builders should probably get rid of the address bar and just go with a Google search box instead.

June Hitwise Dating Site Rankings from Online Personals Watch. I don’t know why I bother to even mention traffic stats, all they reflect is the amount of money sites spend on advertising. It’s the same handful of sites which continue to buy lots of cheap traffic. The numbers have zero to do with the quality of the sites, so what if you can drive a lot of traffic to your site? Just look at how Mate1 is falling off the chart after spending millions to break into the top 10.

What is the value of Yahoo Personals? I can’t believe Hitwise didn’t break out Y! Personals traffic in this article about the value of Yahoo properties.

SNAP Interactive’s ‘Are You Interested’ Dating Application Surpasses 10 Million Users on Facebook.

I love hearing about advice for making a great first impression. Lately I’ve been thinking about the importance of a great personal ad photo. I have 25 photos on Match. I’m snowboarding, driving a tractor, riding my bike, standard boring professional headshot, holding up a giant fish, relaxing with friends or doing rock-star karaoke. I want to show that I have range.

But what constitutes a great primary photo? A friend told me that he put his profile photos on HotOrNot and found out that his primary photo didn’t get nearly as good a response as some of his other pix. What a great idea.

IsACatch takes on Engage. Site home page features a McCain ad, huh?

Because sometimes someone else isn’t around to help.

Facebook Chat Easter Eggs.

SpeedDate Facebook application bites the dust.

Online Dating Goes Web 3.0 with MyLove2be.com. Throwing a bunch of features together isn’t what makes a great dating site, and what’s with charging for the service?

G-dating Dating Site Builder.

HuffPo on Today’s #1 Dating Problem: Love Maximization.

Unfortunately, in today’s online world, it’s very easy to become a “love maximizer” with the tempting smorgasbord of dating choices constantly available. With so much choice, it’s so easy to fall into the temptation of seeking an “upgrade”–even when your sweetie is total sweetie! Or you can wind up with “choice paralysis” and not be able to get into a relationship at all.

OPW’s MyDouble CEO interview. Facial recognition is the new speed dating. There are several well-funded facial recognition companies entering the online dating space. I don’t see the value in the whole “sharing matched photos with friends” thing. That’s not a business, that’s a fun little widget for your profile page. Based on the demos I’ve seen and the conversations I’m having with companies in the space, there are much more compelling ways to implement pattern matching. I’ll be talking a lot more about this in the near future.

Eharmony blog says eHarmony is buying ProjectWedding.

Client Viximo was mentioned in a Boston Globe article about virtual goods. Businessweek has a similar article, Venture Capital Loves Virtual.

Match.com has tiered pricing on the subscription page (thanks to my friend up north for the info.) Did someone at Match go buy some new servers? Site is positively snappy these days.

According to Job listing aggregator Indeed, Yahoo! Personals is looking for a new General Manager. What’s that, 4 managers in as many years? Current GM Egon Smola has been in the position eight months. Here are the official Y! Personals Job Openings.

Bring out the Tinfoil Hats: Paranormal Passions introduces 100% free social networking & online dating for believers in the paranormal…and for those who aren’t sure, but have an open mind. With groups allowing members to focus on their particular area of interest, it is easy to find people who share a passion for ghost hunting, psychic phenomena, UFO’s & hauntings. While there is no way of knowing if other-worldly participants watch over the site too, it would be a great place for them to find open minds, wouldn’t it.

My favorite story of the week by far: President Bush Boosts Porn Industry With Economic Stimulus Plan.

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The majority of online dating companies know little about how people are using their sites.

I had this thought while I was reading about Rearden Commerce, which just raised $100 million. Patrick Grady has spent the past eight years of his life building the ultimate personal Web assistant in relative obscurity. But now his company, Rearden Commerce, is quietly emerging as major force among enterprise startups.

I am coming to New York. What does my Rearden Commerce personal assistant know about me? It knows I am a CEO of a Silicon Valley company, I will be staying downtown, I will be in midtown during the day, and it knows I like sushi.

Successful dating sites track many different metrics, but what do they actually know about their members and how they use the site?

• How many emails sent and to whom.
• Who is being bookmarked and winked at (everyone knows that winks are terrible, women NEVER respond to winks online. If you can’t take the time to write an email, don’t even bother unless you are fabulously handsome and not very bright.)
• Matchwords clicked on.
• Lot’s of search data.
• And so on.

Obviously the list is much longer but you get my point.

Here’s an incredible opportunity to improve the success rate for online daters by paying attention to how people use dating sites. Leveraging this data to empower singles to make better use of dating sites, better choices and increase the amount of interaction with other members.

Yet the majority of dating sites choose to do nothing.

Why do dating sites still have such rudimentary search functionality? How come Transparansee is the only company doing anything remotely interesting with dynamic search in the dating space?

Think about the search process. I enter in my search criteria or fire up a saved search, which I probably created months ago and have no idea what the search parameters are.

Browsing the results, I choose to click on a few people. Of those, I may email one or two and add a few more to my hotlist. What does a dating site learn about the people I click on in search results? How does that information relate to the people I actually email?

Why can’t my search habits be used as fodder for emails from my dating site telling me to try new things? Why can’t Match create a custom Saved Search based on how I use the site, restricting, relaxing or adding new search criteria based on my usage patterns?

How come I never get an email telling me to revise my saved searches? Why do I have to seek out and struggle through a generic FAQ/Help/Magazine to read editorial content and the same damn “10 steps towards better online dating.”

Just because a dating site is intuitive doesn’t mean people are going to use all the features, or explore to see how doing things differently may result in new experiences.

If I have 50 people in my hotlist, why doesn’t my dating site tell me to either email 10 of them or decide to delete them from the list? Where is the proactive trigger helping me make better decisions and get the most out of the site?

Dating sites should know more about you than any other web property, yet they squander the opportunity to leverage this knowledge to make our lives easier.

I’m terrified to restrict the type of person I’m seeking in case I overdo it and am unable to see everyone that might be a good match. So I have to slog though the same people time and time again. I’m sure they are just as sick of seeing me as I am them.

It would be great if I could change the search criteria in real time with slider controls. As I move the slider towards brunette, the blondes disappear from the search results. Modulating the age range would expand and contract the amount of results right in front of me. No need to keep going back to the search page and clumsily changing parameters.

This is not very difficult to implement and would completely change the way we search for people. I’m barely scratching the surface here, so why aren’t dating sites doing this kind of stuff?

If your dating site is based on packaged software or white label services, you’re not going to see these kinds of features anytime soon. You basically get what they sell you. Sure you can customize features, but that gets prohibitively expensive.

So we’re stuck relying on the top 20 dating sites to implement these kinds of features. Only they have so much bureaucracy, planning documents, development timelines, investors and brand identity issues to deal with, they are basically painted into a corner for the near-term.

Why offer improved search when that money could go to marketing? It’s a good point but I still think that better functionality can win over new members more effectively than more marketing dollars.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then online dating search is insane. What do you think?

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Browsing PlentyOfFish, I came across a new link:

New Search –> Users who haven’t gotten an email in over 24 hours sorted by last online.

What a great idea. I’ve built out email communications campaigns for clients and have pushed for this type of functionality, but rarely see this type of messaging customization implemented.

Many sites are spending their precious resources implementing features that have far less impact that simple things like noticing how a member is using the site.

One of the first things I ask new clients is to see a list of variables representing all of the information they gather about people and how they use the site. From there, it’s often straightforward to create queries like “received no email in 24 hours”, or “emails too much”, or “adds a lot of people to Favorites list but doesn’t email them.”

People need help using dating sites, and short of a virtual concierge (another one of my favorite yet-to-be-implemented features), mining dating site databases for information which can be used to enhance the experience of your members remains an afterthought for the majority of dating site operators. Why more sites don’t do this is beyond me.

While talking to a client last week I mentioned that I have never met a woman on Match that was aware of the anonymous calling feature found on every single profile on the service. Is it an implementation problem, awareness issue or do people in general not really care about giving out their phone number online?

Or does Match simply need to do a better job communicating with members?

People want to feel a connection with the sites they are on. Showing members a little love by means of customized messaging based on how they use (or fail to use) dating sites can go a long way, so why not give it a shot?

I’m more than happy to work with your dating site if you want to explore ways to make a deeper connection with your members. Contact me to discuss.

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