[mistercow]

>Further, virtually every academic (read: non-biased) study on the topic of compatablity indicates no correlation between successful relationships and personality/interest based matching.

I'd be interested in reading these studies, but I'm coming up dry searching Google scholar. The best I can find is an article saying that the research that has been done on match systems for online dating is inadequate.

I'm also not clear on how you would even do a good study on that. First of all, is it a controlled study? I find it very difficult to believe, for example, that two people rated on OKC as 10% a match would be as likely to get past the first date as two people ranked as 90%. But if you're not controlling that variable, you're going to be collecting data on match ratings in the range of 80-100%, and it seems very likely that any possible distinction would be lost in the noise at that point.

Moreover, dating site match-making algorithms are not necessarily just a raw number. Taking OKC as an example again, some people might just look at the raw score, while others actually go through and see what conflicting answers were given. A good study on these systems would need to account for these different types of users, as it is very plausible that the latter type is getting a lot more value out of the rating system than the former type.

[amirn]

A good resource for finding articles on this is: http://www.onlinepersonalswatch.com/internetdatingscience/