Stanford Knowledgebase

Sam Yagan

Matchmaking sites offer users a series of questions to determine who meets a member’s criteria for a successful date. What distinguishes OkCupid from its rivals is the extraordinary number of questions it asks and the amount of data it retrieves from the answers. According to CEO and cofounder, Sam Yagan, MBA ’05, OkCupid users choose to answer an average of 233 questions before giving up and letting the site’s algorithms kick in. OkCupid found and filled “an astonishing need by some to quantify the ideal mate,” said the New York Times.

• More: Stanford Business included OkCupid in a February 2008 article about online matchmaking sites.

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Tags: data mining, internet