Looking for love just got a little bit easier. Lycos announced this morning that they were launching a new beta "dating search engine" that is designed to search and index popular dating sites like iMatchup.com, LoveAccess.com, Tickle.com, True.com and Matchmaker.com, which is owned by Lycos.

The Lycos Dating Search engine allows users to perform a general search that designates their own sex, the sex they are seeking, an age range and a geographic area they'd like to search in. An advanced search option allows for even more search criteria including information like career type, whether children are desired and what types of hobbies and interests people have. Different searches can be saved to a personal profile so that the searcher can quickly scan the index for new matches based on previous criteria.

Once users locate profiles of potential mates, the site also allows them to save their favorite profiles for easy access the next time they visit. When searchers select a profile, they will be sent the dating site that features that listing. From there, users that wish to contact potential mates will need to sign up for services from the site where the profiles are featured.

The dating search engine currently features millions of profiles and photos and Lycos expects to be adding more as they finalize deals with other online dating sites. It indexes the complete text of all profiles daily, but only displays profiles that feature photos.

Curt Degenhart, a Lycos senior product manager explained the the company's logic behind opening the new engine. "We did research last year and it revealed that [online] dating customers want a robust and efficient way for searching for dates online."

Lycos plans to profit from the new dating search engine by selling ad space along side the profile listings and by charging partner sites fees to list index and list their databases.

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.