Looking for love online? Change your name to Aardvark
PARIS (AFP) - Faces, bodies, status and humour are all important in Internet dating, but the biggest success factor of all could be your name.
So say scientists who found that people whose online name began with a letter in the top half of the alphabet -- A to M -- get the most "looks" from others.
"Several factors make a difference when looking for love in a digital setting," said Khalid Khan, a professor at Queen Mary University of London.
"Starting with a screen name with a letter in the top half of the alphabet is surprisingly important -- because several measures of success, such as educational attainment and income, are linked to names higher up the alphabet.
"Add to this the fact that search engines sort names alphabetically."
Khan and Sameer Chaudhry at Barts and the London School of Medicine sought objective data on how people conveyed their attractiveness on dating sites, and whether others responded to it.
They trawled through 3,938 studies into online dating, published in psychology, sociology and behavioural science journals.
Eighty-six of these met their criteria. The numbers were crunched, resulting in what could be termed a Statisticians' Guide to Online Courtship.It appears, coincidentally in the runup to St. Valentine's Day, in a specialised journal, Evidence Based Medicine.
Khan and Chaudhry admit their investigation has limitations.
The methods used to collect data were not standard across all of the studies. This made it difficult in some respects to get a clear picture.
Nor did they know whether any real-life dates blossomed into long-term relationships.
Despite this, the implications of the probe "are many," they say.
"Online daters focus too much on details without realising that likeability springs from subconscious initial impressions."