Imagine, for a moment, that your most clandestine internet searches—anxiety-riddled deep dives on WebMD, Google queries wondering if your cat is trying to kill you, or why farts smell the way they do—were the key to finding a soulmate. Would you sign up for a dating site that guaranteed connection in return for your browser history?
For more than a decade, developers have tried to perfect the science of compatibility. Tinder promised infinite swipes. Bumble let women make the first move. Feeld championed polyamory. Grindr was a gay utopia (until it became overrun with ads). Lex was entirely text based. And Pure, an anonymous dating app, was all about shameless hookups. Now as AI reimagines the landscape of Big Dating, one platform is offering a solution no one asked for: matching singles based on their browser histories.
While the idea sounds antithetical to an era where dating and social media profiles writ large are perfectly curated, that’s exactly the point, according to Browser Dating artist and developer Dries Depoorter, who is known for creating digital projects with an eye for mischief that blur the line between reality and farce. (He insists the dating site is 100 percent legit.)
“There’s honesty in that,” Depoorter, who is based in Ghent, Belgium, says of the concept.
Despite their flaws, dating sites and apps also remain the best place to meet future partners (if you’re young and horny they are mostly unavoidable). According to Pew Research, 42 percent of US adults say online dating made finding a partner easier.
But online dating today has become more about the illusion of potential rather than the reality of who someone actually is. The attraction of discovery—believing our private curiosities make for a better portrait of who people actually are—appealed to Depoorter. He thinks Browser Dating can be a genuine alternative to finding genuine love.
As opposed to Hinge or Raya, where users craft their profiles with expertly angled-photos and facts cherry-picked to make themselves seem as witty and interesting as possible, on Browser Dating, there is no hiding the real you. “Instead of choosing the best pictures or best things about yourself, this will show a side of you that you’d never pick. You’re not able to choose from your search history—you have to upload all of it.”
Though, for now at least, users of Browser Dating have a small pool to choose from—less than 1,000 users have signed up since its launch last week. Users are first required to download a Chrome or Firefox extension, which they use to export their recent browser history and then upload to the site. Profiles feature the usual bare outline of a person: age, location, gender, and sexual preference. A browsing personality profile is also generated for each user, offering insight into how they navigate the internet. Matches are not limited by location, though Depoorter says there is an option to restrict search by state or country, if they so choose. Once matched, you won’t see the other person’s search history, only a summary of “fun facts” about shared interests—perhaps pointing out your bizarre Wikipedia obsession with the “dancing plague” or the time of day you’re most active online—which is meant to accentuate the harmonies of your online behaviors.