By Allie Ehrhart and Laura Finaldi, News Staff.

After failed attempts at meeting people at parties or bars, terrible blind date experiences or just for the fun of it, many college students are tapping into online dating. Not only do these sites offer hundreds – even thousands – of prospects in one place, but one can find a potential partner from the comfort of their own home.

With plenty of traditional online dating options like eHarmony or Match.com being for the older, marriage-ready crowd, sites geared toward students are growing in popularity. Students can choose between plenty of sites, including OkCupid, Zoosk and StudentLove.

According to an article in The New Yorker, members of online dating sites are matched on both what users say they want and based on their “revealed preference,” on what they continue to show interest in based on their activity on the site. These are taken into account, and then the site finds people who have a similar difference between these. Based on this, the algorithm can determine what an experience with the site will be, and can make match suggestions.

All math aside, for students looking to meet someone special who is their age, online dating may not always be rainbows and butterflies. For a student looking for something serious, looking online may not be the best option. Anna Cartella, a middler English major and former OkCupid user, said she thinks dating sites geared towards college students are much more casual and not for people looking for anything serious.

“You really only know what they [someone you met online] pretend they are or think they are,” Cartella said. “It’s like, okay, I get it, you like Indian food, you think you’re smart – but how does that make you different from everyone else?”

Cartella said she deleted her OkCupid account because of the floods of messages she would get on a daily basis, none of which were very articulate, and mostly consisted of “hey beautiful,” “what’s up” and the like. She added that sometimes online dating opens people up to new horizons.

“It’s nice because you get to meet people who aren’t necessarily in your social circle or school,” she said. “You also get to meet ‘real’ people who are out of college and have real jobs.”

When searching for the perfect college dating site, there are plenty of options. OkCupid is an analysis-heavy site. Every quiz a user takes and every question a user answers amps up their potential match rating and slightly alters the pool of potential new mates.

For example, if a user is asked “do you prefer dogs or cats?” and the user answers with “dogs,” they then rate how important it would be to find someone else that has also answered with “dogs,” on a scale going from irrelevant to mandatory. The user can even add a written explanation of their answers.

On Zoosk, a user can “boost up!” (or pay) for coins to make their profile immediately seen by others on the top of the web page. Zoosk also tells users how popular their profiles are by how many emails, profile views and chat requests they receive.

Even though users can search for matches without signing up, if someone is looking for listings of only college students, StudentLove only allows users with an .edu email address to join.

It may seem all-too-simple to be able to log into a website and suddenly find your soulmate, or at least someone to spend the weekends with, but Cartella said the bad rap associated with dating online is even more apparent to those who do it.

“I was dating someone I met on there for awhile, and I couldn’t tell my parents how we met because they would freak out,” she said. “People respond differently to it when you date online.”

In the end, all of these sites share a common purpose: to bring people together. Whether it’s through match questions or seeing someone smiling from his or her profile picture at the top of a web page, users receive similar information about other people no matter what site it is. The websites do the dirty work (or the introduction), but the rest is up to the individuals actually meeting up in person and seeing if it will work out, something Cartella said she thinks is rare.

“[My ex and I have] determined our friendship is good but we always say we’d never go back on OkCupid,” she said.