Online Dating Mysteries Revealed (Even the Politically Incorrect Ones)

Want to get an online date? Keep your messages short.

For men, whites are the most likely to get a response online; Indians the least likely. Among women, Middle Easterners garner the most responses; black women the fewest

Those are among the not-always-politically-correct findings unearthed by the statisticians at OkCupid, a free online dating site started by a group of Harvard graduates armed with math degrees.

The 5-year-old site boasts 1 million active users -- comparable to Match.com and eHarmony, two services that require paid subscriptions. Like Match.com, OkCupid users can look at any profile they want -- something eHarmony doesn't allow subscribers to do. Like eHarmony, OkCupid's workhorse is a statistical algorithm driven by how users respond to a range of personal, political and religious questions. But unlike eHarmony, which bases questions on the founders' research, OkCupid takes the participatory approach adopted by YouTube and other Web 2.0 sites. Almost all of the questions are submitted by other users, who wind up answering an average of 233 of them.

OkCupid also takes an extra step the other sites don't: sharing information about users' online dating behavior. Earlier this year, the site created a blog to post research, drawing on data from the site, a la Google. Here's a sampling of what the numbers show so far.

Keep Messages Short

The average guy on OkCupid gets one response for about every five messages he sends to different women. Factor in the effort it takes to tailor a message to a specific profile, and brevity is more efficient in landing a date. OkCupid's research suggests that the optimal message length for a guy is 200 characters, or roughly one minute of typing.

For women, it doesn't matter. They get a 40 percent response rate no matter how much they type. Why? The company believes that guys -- not surprisingly -- put much more emphasis on a woman's picture. A woman doesn't need to worry as much about what she says, just that she gets on her potential date's radar. So why waste time? OkCupid recommends women write even shorter messages of about 50 characters when initiating contact.

Interestingly, when looking at same-sex contacts, women-to-women messaging patterns resemble men-to-women behavior, while men-to-men patterns are more consistent with women-to-men message behavior.

Not All E-mail Is Equal

OkCupid analyzed about 500,000 first-contact messages and found these to be among the best strategies for getting a response:

-- Be specific. Mention something in the profile of the person being contacted

-- Avoid net-speak like "ur," "r u," "B4," etc.

-- Don't compliment physical characteristics.

-- Act modest, especially men.

Your Race Matters

The numbers also show that attraction isn't color-blind. To wit:

-- Among males, white guys get the most frequent responses (29 percent of the time) and are least likely to respond (40 percent).

-- Indian men have the worst luck, getting responses only 20 percent of the time.

-- Among females, black women are the most likely to write back to a guy (34 percent) but the least likely to get a response if they initiate contact (34 percent).

-- Middle Eastern women get responses almost half the time, the most of any ethnicity. And even though white guys are pickiest about whom they write back to, they're most likely to respond to Middle Eastern women (47 percent of the time versus an overall response rate of 40 percent).

-- Pretty much across the board, whites are viewed as the most attractive group. This is how different ethnicities answered the following question: "Not to be racist but which ethnicity do you find to be most attractive?"

Your Religion (or Lack Thereof) Matters, Too

Using the word "atheist" actually improves the chances of getting a response; invoking "god" leads to worse-than-average response rates.