Finding Your Match on Match.com: Part 4, Keyword Searches… Worth it?
Written by e
September 26, 2008
4 Comments
In Part One of this series, you learned why the three major searches promoted by match.com are in essence pretty useless. In Part Two, you set up your Dream Girl Search. In Part Three, we tweaked the Dream Girl to a Realistic Girl.
Another search function that can be useful is the Keyword Search. These are especially useful if you have a specific interest that you hope to share with your geek girl.
They will only filter by gender, age, location and keyword. It will be your responsibility to sift through the profiles to be sure the girl who loves your favorite local band is also a non-smoking vegetarian Libertarian. (Or not!)
Step One: Click Search, then Keyword
Don’t use the keyword box at the bottom of the page. Use the little text link at the top. See it up there next to Custom?
Step Two: Fill it In!
Here’s the screen you’ll see when you get to the Keyword Search:
Set your gender preference and age range first.
Then, pick your first keyword. Go with something specific. You want a girl who is into geology? MMORPGs? Volunteering? Cappuccino? Tolstoy?
Step Three: Location, Location, Location
Consider how far you’d be willing to drive to be with someone you’d be dating. Remember, you’d want to see this person a lot if things were going well!
Step Four: Don’t Forget To Save
The most important thing is to save this search so you can go back and use it later. Remember to save each keyword as a different search.
You can select to have match.com email you if a match to this search comes up. That’s up to you.
In the next and last post of the series…
“I’ve got all these searches set up, now what do I do?“
E. Foley is a geek girl extraordinaire. She writes amazing online dating profiles for geeks and non-geeks, helping clients all over the world find love. Her writing can be found at Dating Sites Reviews, Examiner.com, and elsewhere as a ghostwriter. By day, she is the Copywriter at ThinkGeek. She lives in Maryland with DaveTheGame and her adorable cats, Mr. Peanut and Don Juan. (Email e, or follow @geeksdreamgirl on Twitter.)
On the “Find profiles with keyword(s)” have you figured out how to do an “A+B” search? As an example, someone who likes camping and cats. When I enter both words in the search line, it returns all who have interest in either.
@ Art Black – That’ll work, sort of. If you put in cat camping, you’ll get people with both words in their profiles.. HOWEVER, with small words like “cat” you’ll get all words that include “cat” like, oh, “education”. Try to be super specific if you’re going to put in two or more keywords.
Thanks for the reply. The problem I’m seeing is that when I enter two words, it is doing an “or” rather than “and” search. With an “and” search, I would expect the number of returns to be smaller for a multiple word search than for a single word search. But when you enter multiple words, the return list gets bigger, not smaller. That would indicate it is doing an “or”.
@ Art – That’s one of the sucky parts about Match’s search functions. They prefer you to do searches THEIR way, so they make it nearly impossible to do certain things.
I prefer setting up the custom searches (described in this series) and then just reading through profiles.