Online dating has shed its stigma as matchmaker for the awkward (Goodwin 1990) to claim a new prominence in the social lives of millions of users. In August 2003 alone, 40 million unique users visited online dating sites in the United States alone, according to U.S. News & World Report -- that's about half the number of single adults in the U.S. Given their prevalence, it seems likely that online dating systems have begun to influence not only individual lives but also cultural notions of love and attraction with their overflowing catalogues of potential partners and their sometimes idiosyncratic choices of personal characteristics to highlight. But despite the incredible number of people using these services, we know little about how users perceive each other and interact through these mediated channels, or how such technologies might affect their selection of partners for dating, sex, and marriage.
Millennia of evolution have left humans with a set of perceptual and interpretive processes that allow us efficiently to identify desirable potential partners -- what happens when we go online and forfeit most of the sensory channels that drive this well-refined offline process? How can we improve the design of online dating systems to help users make better-informed decisions about whom they wish to contact and follow those decisions with effective communication? Moreover, might what we learn about searching and matching in a romantic context generalize to non-romantic situations, like matching potential employees with employers? To answer these questions, we have undertaken a research agenda with an integrative, multi-method approach grounded in social psychological theory and powered by data mining, statistical analysis, and interactive visualization.