What is 'browsing' vs 'searching' in online dating?
The difference between browsing and searching is that in browsing, you randomly go through different people's online dating profiles and you get a sense of who's on the dating site and what they're like, and what the opportunities are at that site. When you're searching, you're looking for specific characteristics that you're interested in, and you're only going to look at people who have these characteristics that you lay out. For women, if you were to go to a shoe store, and you didn't know what kind of shoes you wanted, you'd walk down every aisle - "Do I want a tennis shoe, do I want a sandal, do I want a high heel, do I want a boot?" Or, you would be going to the store because you need a pair of shoes for that wedding, for example, and they have to be light blue to match your dress, they have to have 2 inch heels, they have to have a closed toe because your mother wants you to be very formal. You'd have a specific set of parameters that you take with you to the store; that's like searching. If you're going to be walking down the aisles, that's browsing. We don't want to leave men out of the definition of browsing and searching, so for men, it's much like when you go to Home Depot, and you're going down every aisle, just loving it - that's browsing. You're just checking out everything. Searching is when you need a specific power tool, or specific paint, you put in the key word paint or power tool, and you go to that specific section.
