A big part of the success of Tinder was the sense that everybody was there, and it quickly became the number-one dating app, and it’s continued to retain the top spot in the world today

In this extract from Find Love, matchmaker and Tinder’s Global Relationship Science Expert Paul Brunson unpacks the evolution, advantages, and pitfalls of online dating – and how to set up the ideal profile.

While there are many ways of meeting people in real life, and this might be preferable for a lot of people, the reality is online is such a big part of dating today that it can’t be ignored. If you want to maximise the size of your pool of potential partners, you have to take advantage of every means at your disposal.

Tinder also opened up the dating landscape to casual dating, or what we now know evolutionary psychologists would call short-term mating, leading to it being known as the hook-up app

Although online dating came to prominence in the twenty-first century, most people probably don’t realise that it really started in the 1960s. And it began where a lot of tech ideas come from: a prestigious university. In 1965, three Harvard undergraduates by the names of Jeffrey C. Tarr, David L. Crump and Vaughan Morrill created Operation Match for students of Ivy League universities. Users filled out a questionnaire and returned it with a fee. Their answers were then run through a computer algorithm and, a couple of weeks later, a list of matches and their telephone numbers was sent back. It was all about matching people based on their interests and values. One of the things I find most interesting about Operation Match is that it didn’t include a photo, and there were very few questions about attractiveness – the only one was along the lines of ‘How important is attractiveness to you?’ When you fast-forward to today, it’s all about photos.

Although Tarr and Crump later set up a business called Compatibility Research, Inc. with a former Cornell student called Douglas H. Ginsburg, who went on to become a senior judge, computer dating didn’t really take off for another thirty years with the introduction of Match in 1995. This was an online dating site that again centred around a long list of questions, although there was now the option to upload photos too. This was followed by other popular sites, such as eHarmony, which had an almost 14 per cent share of the US dating-services . This was the year that the online dating landscape changed for ever with the introduction of Tinder, the first mobile dating app. This allowed quick access and introduced the concept of the swipe feature in dating – swipe right if you’re interested, swipe left for no – simplifying the process compared with the previous generation of web-based dating sites (the eHarmony questionnaire had as many as 450 questions at one point).

The developers realised that a lot of people don’t start out wanting a long-term partner and that the dating landscape is made up of people with all sorts of different relationship goals. ‘ As a result, it became the cool spot. As well as convenience, people want to be at the place where everybody else is. When I was at college, some of my friends always wanted to go to the club that was known to have the most women. They didn’t care where it was or what music it was playing as long as it was where the majority of women were likely to be.