On Tinder and Hinge, no. Tinder says you cannot search for a specific person, and that you adjust who you see by updating your Discovery preferences. Hinge fills your Discover feed with recommendations based on mutual interest, and it has no lookup for one name. Some other dating sites do have search tools, but these two are built to choose for you, not to be searched.

What Tinder gives you instead

Tinder's answer is Discovery preferences. You change who you see by updating them, and Tinder picks from the people who fit.

Tinder also has a Search feature, which it describes as limited to some iOS users in some markets. It looks for interests and lifestyle terms, such as music lovers or pet parents. So you can aim at a kind of person, not at one person.

Tinder says plainly that Search does not return results for searches using someone's name, age or social handles. It says that means the feature cannot be used to find specific individuals, or to prevent off-platform harassment. That is a deliberate limit. Tinder's own mention of off-platform harassment suggests the reason: an app that let you look up a woman by name would also let any man find a woman who did not want to be found.

What Hinge gives you instead

Hinge fills your Discover feed with recommendations based on mutual interest. You do not pick whom to look at. Hinge does.

You do get some control. Hinge says you can remove or report a profile you would rather not see again.

And there is one rule about likes that surprises men. Hinge says that after you send a Like, you will not see that profile again unless they choose to match with you.

What that last rule means

If you Liked a woman on Hinge and she never matched, she is not coming back into your feed. You will not stumble over her again by scrolling.

It can look like a glitch, but it is how the app is built, and it settles the question for you. If a Like went nowhere, she either passed or never saw you, and there is nothing further to find.

So searching for her again is not only impossible. It is also a poor use of an evening, because the same effort goes further on women who are still in your feed.

Why a man wants to find one particular woman

The name he is typing almost always belongs to someone from outside the app: a woman he spoke to at a party or a class, an ex, or a woman he is seeing and wants to check up on.

The app is the wrong tool for all three. For the woman you met, go back to the place you met her or ask a mutual friend. For the ex, the better answer is to leave it. For the woman you are seeing, ask her.

The lesson from the first case is about the moment, not the app. a dating coach's point on texting is to keep a conversation heading toward a close, and in person the close is her number. Asking while the talk is going well beats hoping an app brings her back.

Use the controls you do have

Both apps give you a little steering, and it is worth using. On Tinder, update your Discovery preferences so the people you see fit what you want. On Hinge, remove or report profiles you would rather not see again, so the feed stops filling with people who are not right for you.

Neither control finds one woman. Both make the next fifty you see more useful, which is the only kind of search these apps support.

Where the effort pays instead

Spend it on the women the app does show you.

a dating coach breaks online dating into steps: how many women see you, how many like you, how many reply, how many give a number, how many meet. Wondering about one missing face is a distraction from those steps. A man who fixes his weakest step gets more from an hour than a man who spends it hunting.

Read the prompts of the women the app puts in front of you. Pick one detail, and send a note about it. Keep it specific, so she has something easy to answer. Then move toward a plan quickly, since a woman who matched wants to go on a date.

When a search tool would not help anyway

Even a perfect search would only solve the easy half of the problem. Finding a woman is the first step. Getting her to reply, and then to meet, is where most men lose her.

If your likes turn into conversations but your conversations rarely turn into dates, that is the thing to fix. It is far easier to fix when someone reads the actual messages you sent, instead of guessing.