Google Does Dating
Google's April Fool's joke becomes reality. Last night, I searched "asian dating" on Google, and noticed the following:
This doesn't appear every time I search, so the feature is still deploying across their servers. Searches for "asian dating," "black dating," "hispanic dating," activate the Base search, while oddly enough, it didn't come up under plain, old "dating," nor did anything extra come up for "eskimo dating."
Google Base enables this specialized search. The database displays relevant, and meaningful data - the sorted data provides much more intelligence to searches vs. keywords.
Dating sites can either individually or batch upload profiles. Individuals can upload their own profile directly to Google base, if they want to put up contact info without registering for a dating site - although they still need to register on individual sites to find users. However, the profiles disappear after 30 days. Once the major dating sites decide to jump into Base, Google becomes the dominant player in personals search.
The "Go" button brings up a Google Base and Google Maps mashup.
As the site operator for a free, newfangled dating site for Asians, I'm a little disappointed. This new feature tilts users towards the largest dating sites, so small fries don't get the chance to build up their base without a large media spend (print/radio/tv). I'll know over the next few weeks how drastically this affects general searches for the site - but I'm afraid the effect is quite negative. I don't think it's fatal, but it will slow down site growth and sign-ups significantly.
So, net-net? Great for daters, and finding people they might be interested in meeting, crappy for me. C'est la vie. Good job, Google.
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