What a shame that you can’t do a Boolean or other sophisticated search on most dating sites. For example, maybe you are a man who wants to find a woman who loves snuggling, and she can be anywhere in the United States except California. Now, on Match.com or OKCupid.com or most other dating sites, you could do a keyword search for “snuggling”, and you can search the entire United States, or you can search one particular state. But you can’t search all of the states except California. Using this example, and the power of Google, we are going to show you how you can search a dating site for exactly the criteria you want.

First, the trick is to search from Google, not from the dating site itself. Of course, make sure that you are logged in to your account on the dating site, so that you can go directly to any interesting results.

Ok, ready? Go to Google, and type (without yet hitting return):

site:match.com    or site:okcupid.com    ..or site:{your dating site of choice.com}

Next, type the words that you want to be present in the profiles of your prospective matches. In our example, that is the word “snuggling”.

Ok, so so far your search box in Google looks like this:

site:match.com snuggling

Now, because you are a man, seeking a woman, include the term “female” (as that is how Match.com designates a profile belonging to a woman):

site:match.com snuggling female

Now, finally, you don’t want her to be in California, so you are going to exclude the term “California” by putting a minus sign in front of it (be sure to have no space between the minus sign and the term you want to exclude):

site:match.com snugging female -California

Now, run your search.

 

Same search but using site:okcupid.com:

 

 

Of course, you can refine this as much as you like. If you want to include terms that consist of more than one word – for example “natural blonde” – then surround the term in quotation marks, like this:

site:match.com snugging female -California “natural blonde”

 

 

Sometimes you will find that even though you use a term like “snuggling”, the results will include similar words like “snuggled” or even, as here, “cuddled”. If that is happening, and you want only your specific term, period, you can put even single-word key terms in quotation marks – that tells Google that you want only exact matches for your terms.

Be sure to let us know what your favourite search is!