GooDate.com: A Lawsuit In The Making

In some ways the notion behind GooDate is quite interesting. The basic idea focuses on the evil truth about online dating: it's a lot of work. The process of searching, filtering, qualifying, and dating is not just time-consuming, it's downright stressful. Now, take that experience and multiply it across the multitude of sites that you can use to find your next date and you can see how this becomes a major undertaking.

The promise of GooDate, it seems, is that you can consolidate your searching efforts using a veritable dating meta-search engine. Currently, you configure your search criteria and then you can pivot those results to see across match.com, Yahoo!, FriendFinder, AmericanSingles, and WebDate, though the promise is there that there will indeed be "More Sites". Somewhat disappointing, however, is that the results aren't blended. If anything, I am going to assume that this is a technical limitation since the results would have to be scraped in more detail.

Of course, the problem is both the branding and the re-branding. On the one hand, they've chosen to "lift" a large part of the branding from Google (pending lawsuit 1). On the other hand, they are re-branding/purposing the search results from some of the largest players in the business (pending lawsuits 2,3,4). Now I could be wrong, and there could be agreements in place to authorize this use, but I just don't get the feeling that's the case.

So in summary, interesting idea but plagued with issues.