🗺️ Map-based search | Find people within a chosen distance of you

Last week, we introduced a new feature that allows you to find people within a chosen distance from your location using a map-based search. This greatly improves the overall functionality of our site and makes it easier to connect with nearby members.

You can set your location by placing a marker on a map. For privacy reasons, we recommend choosing a random location within your city rather than placing the marker close to your home.

This approach improves upon many dating apps that use your precise GPS location. Sharing exact GPS data can create privacy risks unless protections are in place to prevent others from determining your exact location.

Previously, searches could only be performed by country, region, or city. Searching by region often returned too many results, while searching by city excluded people in nearby towns and surrounding areas.

To support members who joined before the map-based search was introduced, we use a database containing approximately 1.9 million towns and cities, each mapped to latitude and longitude coordinates. This allows us to provide location-based search results for existing members.

You can also choose to exclude members who have not completed their profiles, helping improve the quality of search results.

The final three options under “Maximum distance from you (km)” — region, country, and world — perform searches without using map coordinates. If you are unsure which distance to choose, we recommend selecting your region.

Search results prioritise members who have been active most recently. For this reason, we suggest setting “Maximum search results” to a low number. For example, if there are 100 members within 100 km of you, and 20 have logged in within the past month while 80 have not logged in for over a year, limiting results to 50 members will significantly increase the proportion of recently active users. If you display all 100 results, most may be inactive.

Our site sends email notifications to members when they receive new messages. This means contacting inactive members can still be worthwhile. However, some inactive members may no longer use the site, may have found a partner, or may not receive notifications if emails are filtered into bulk or junk folders. Based on limited testing, Gmail appears to handle these notifications more reliably than Hotmail/Outlook. You may also wish to consider privacy-focused email providers such as mailfence.com or mailbox.org as alternatives to mainstream technology providers.