Match Maker, Match Maker...

2008. The year of the online match-maker wars. History will recall the tens of thousands of teary-eyed singles cut down in the cross fire. Indeed, the web rivals were a match made in HELL!

Ok, I've already discussed fat overweight people on television. So now it's on to those annoying commercials for Chemistry.com or whatever it's called. You know the ones, with the poor souls thoroughly flummoxed by the rejection of their application by E-Harmony. But I'm digressing from what I really want to say.

I would really like to conduct a research study of the success of these various match-makers. I'm curious what effect, if any, their matching/comparison algorithms have on the outcomes of paired couples. Specifically, I wonder if people convince themselves that the man or woman they get matched with are "really great" only because some computer program tells them so. Admittedly, this would be a daunting task, separating out the effects of all the variables, but surely some freakonomist out there could crunch the data. There are probably some ethical issues, too, but come on... these people are rejects anyway. The computer said so.