How do you choose a date?
Whose company would you enjoy?
Well one thing you can consider is looks.
Like everything else these days courtship has gone online.
Can that so call science really find your soul mate?
But I've never been out on a dinner date before. I'm just scared to death.
Online dating is now a multibillion-dollar industry.
One in five dating relationships started online.
But is there really a formula for love?
It's 1959 and two electrical engineering students at Stanford are working on their
final class project.
It uses a questionnaire and an IBM 650 to matchmake 49 men and 49 women.
They call it the Happy Families Planning Service.
There are no long-term matches but they do get an A for their work.
It was 1960s when computer scientists started to get interested in personal relationships
and in particular they were interested in whether they could improve the efficiency
by which people matched.
Similar small data-driven systems appear but in 1965 it's Operation Match that really
starts to 'take the blindness out of a blind date'.
For $3 you can answer over 100 questions about yourself and your ideal date.
The answers are recorded on punch cards, run through a five-ton IBM computer and a few
weeks later, you get the names and numbers of your top six matches.
Computer technology has moved so fast.
It matched on the basis of things that people
had in common.
So religion, hobbies, attitudes to life in general. And we actually know now
that that's not the most effective way of matching people.
Six months after the launch, 90,000 Operation Match questionnaires are received,
making the company $270,000.
In 1995 Match.com is launched by American engineer Gary Kremen.
And then in 2005 a group of employees
at PayPal create a website where people can
upload videos of themselves to try and get a date.
The tagline is Tune In, Hook Up.
It doesn't take off so instead it rebrands itself as YouTube.
Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.
It's 2007 and the iPhone has just been released.
Soon new dating apps start to appear.
Most dating apps are notoriously private about
the algorithms they use and that's because they use quite simple ones.
And they don't have much very much proof that any of them
lead to better matching.
They don't want everyone to find love on the first hit
because then they'd all be out of business.
In 2017 around 40% of American heterosexual couples first meet online.
And by 2018 dating services in the US are estimated to be a $3 billion a year business.
Lots of people anecdotally are saying they're fed up of using dating apps but at the same time
business is absolutely booming.
The number of users between 2016 and 2017 in the world doubled.
Even though there's on the horizon, the possibility of video dating and augmented reality for dating,
none of those things can give you an indication of chemistry and you could only
find that out when you meet somebody face to face.
That's still going to be overridingly
the way in which people meet and fall in love.