Meetic // Business Case

Meetic, the number one site for online dating, has chosen the Pertimm solution for its search engine

Paris – June 6, 2007 – The European leader for online dating has turned to Pertimm for improving its service to the users of its web site. Meetic has opted to deploy the multimedia search platform from Pertimm in order to allow web users to find their ideal partner even more quickly!

Success based on quality of service

Meetic’s success over 5 years speaks for itself, with over 28 million registered profiles since its creation. The web site database is continuously being developed. Quality of service and the permanent quest for innovation have contributed to the success of the online dating site. In order to continue to set the standard and to mark itself out in an increasingly competitive field, those in charge of Meetic were looking to offer their members more features while at the same time limiting the load on the servers so as to keep down the response times, such a crucial factor in Internet use.

New features

Pertimm, the French software vendor specializing in search engines, proposed a multimedia search platform from which two applications have been derived: a semantic search engine and a query accelerator for databases. It is the second of these applications, Pertimm Database Accelerator, that was chosen by Meetic to address its new development challenges.

The Meetic managers wanted web users to be able to make queries by minimum age, maximum age or between two values. They also told Pertimm that they wanted to be able to expand the scope of the search by taking account of the content of the personal ad and having the possibility of defining any set of cross-criteria. Finally, they wanted to allow members to enjoy improved sort possibilities for the results according to diverse criteria:
for example, formulating a query with respect to the presence or not of a photo, the members currently online, etc.

All this they wanted, while at the same time increasing the data processing capacity and the speed of response to queries. The implementation of the Pertimm solution makes it possible to carry out complex cross-searches in response times of less than a tenth of a second, so allowing over 150 queries per second per machine.

In the first instance, Pertimm conducted a study of the structure and content of the actual Meetic database, which incorporates numerous criteria and therefore numerous nomenclatures. Present in 15 countries, the complete base comprises almost 10 million subscribers and is divided up into four independent databases. In all, these contain some 80 fields (age, gender, hobbies, etc.). Since the number of queries grows in proportion to the number of members, the Pertimm audit concentrated above all on making significant improvements to the query response times.

Following this audit, Pertimm implemented its Database Accelerator solution in order to accelerate response times and enable the integration of new features in the searches.
The indexing of the base was done using a complete export of the base in XML format.
For the dynamic updating of this data, partial XML exports were used and sent to the Pertimm search servers. This complete and scheduled export makes it possible to resynchronize regularly the entire mechanism, even though there are almost 100,000 modifications daily. The supported capacity today is for over 57 million queries per 24 hours.

Rapid implementation

This mission was carried out over 6 months, including the deployment and test phases.
The speed of implementation can be attributed to the very nature of the Pertimm solution, which latches on to the existing system without modifying the installations already in place, including the database management system (DBMS). Pertimm Database Accelerator is a database search server that is supplied with selected Meetic data, with the queries then passing via one or more query nodes, which will then poll several servers in parallel.
Thanks to this system, dating site query times have been accelerated more than 500-fold.