Game, Set & Cyber-Match

Julia Davila-Lampe/Getty Images

At 30, after a breakup that involved spotting her boyfriend draped around ­another woman, digital strategist Amy Webb ­decided to try meeting men online. And she did: On JDate, Match.com, and ­eHarmony, she met guys who were six inches shorter or 30 pounds heavier than advertised; who picked expensive restaurants and passed the check to her; and who told her, mid drink, that they were married.

ON ELLE: 25 Little Ways To Make Your Relationship Better

One night, after another bad match and a solo bottle of wine, Webb rejoined JDate—this time posing as a man, to check out her competition. Then she took it further. Webb crafted 10 male profiles so perfect they had to be fake (sample code name: JewishDoc1000) to gather data: what the site's most popular women looked like, which keywords they used, how they timed their messages.

“It seemed strange now, that I'd just slap together my online dating profile, when I'd spent days agonizing over my résumé, tweaking and massaging it to land the perfect job,” Webb writes in Data, A Love Story (Duffon), one of three new books about online dating, in which she ­recounts how she cracked the online dating code to meet her now husband. “Yet here I was, husband hunting and armed with only a handful of half-assed bullet points.”