Edward at Other Singles has been using Google Trends to track the popularity of the term "dating" according to geography.

Check out the graph. It shows Google search terms related to dating from regions of the world. Searches related to "dating" on Google eclipse all of the other countries combined. Granted Google Trends is still in Beta, even if the results are off by 50% there are still a lot of Nigerian "daters" looking for "dates". I have to wonder how many dating sites are using AdWords and not filtering out where their AdWords display (exclude Nigeria for example).

Edward outs scammers from OtherSingles.com on his blog. I would like to hear more dating sites talk about the idea of a shared whitelist or blacklist, which are popular in today's email systems.

As I've said many times, rate-a-date sites are as good as the data they publish and the number of people using any one site. I believe something along the lines of a shared blacklist would improve the quality of participating dating sites and be good for online dating industry as a whole.

The solution could be as straightforward as XML formatted messages containing information about blacklisted members. Of course there is a lot more that needs to be figured out, that's where background checks and other identification systems come into play. At Identity Mashup a few weeks ago there were people talking about this kind of solution, only they weren't talking about online dating.

This idea needs more perspective from inside the dating industry. How many sites would be open to discussing sharing this type of data between competitors? Does the potential for increased revenue from a clean member database outweigh the cost of putting such a system in place? How about the effect on the industry overall? Or do you think customer service reps will continue to be able to stay on top of scammers and spammers and consumers won't care one way or the other? I say let the machines do it.

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