What Is the Tinder Search Feature and What Can It Find?

Tinder Search is the magnifying glass in the top left corner of the Discovery tab. You type an interest or a way of life, such as music lovers, pet parents, a sport or an artist, and it brings up people whose details fit. It will not find one particular person, so a name, an age or a social handle returns nothing.

Open the Discovery tab and look at the top left corner. The magnifying glass is Search. Tap it and you get a box to type in.

If you do not see it, nothing is broken. Tinder describes Search as a feature it is testing with iPhone users in select markets. An Android phone, or an iPhone in a city outside the test, will not show the icon, and there is no setting that turns it on.

Search is built around interests and lifestyle. Tinder's own examples are music lovers, pet parents, and fans of particular sports and artists. Think of the things a person would put on a weekend plan rather than on a form.

To decide who fits a search, Tinder reads what people have put on their profiles: their photos, the details in their bio and the other parts of the profile. A woman who wrote that she runs trail races, and who has a race photo in her set, is the kind of person a search for runners can bring up.

Tinder is plain about this. Search is not meant for finding a specific person, and it returns no results for a name, an age or a social handle. It also returns nothing for sensitive traits such as race, nationality or religion.

So it is no use for tracking down the woman you talked to at a party, checking whether a coworker is on the app, or seeing what your ex is up to. That limit is deliberate. If you want to see a woman again after meeting her in person, the reliable route is still the obvious one: get her number while you are standing in front of her.

Most men think of Search as a tool for finding women. The more useful way to see it is that women can use it to find you, and they can only find what you have given the app to read.

a dating coach's complaint about most men's profiles is not that they are unattractive. It is that they are boring and read like every other guy on the app: works hard, plays hard, loves his dog, travels when he can. A search for anything specific will never land on that, because there is nothing in it to match.

My rule for every photo and every line is that each one should say something specific about you. If you cannot explain what a photo is telling her, it probably does not belong. Search makes that rule literal. A photo of you on a climbing wall and one line about the gym where you climb give the app something real to match against. "I like being outdoors" gives it nothing.

One caution. Only list interests you actually have. A man who adds hiking to catch searches for hikers, then turns up to a first date having never owned boots, has gained nothing. He has set up a date that starts with her feeling misled.

The other good use is narrowing down who you look at.

a dating coach's read on the apps is that swiping right on almost everyone works against you. The apps seem to treat an unselective man as a less attractive one, and they have little reason to show him the women he actually wants. When his students stopped right-swiping on everybody and started choosing, their results got better.

Search points you at women who share something real with you, which makes being selective easy. It also hands you a simple way to start the conversation, because she put that interest there herself. A short line about the thing you have in common beats a bare "hey" by a long way, and it tells her you actually looked.

Search is a way to find more people. Finding more people is the last job in a good session, not the first.

a dating coach keeps his own app time to about half an hour a day, split into two short blocks. He starts with the women closest to a date and pins down the plans. Then he writes to new matches he has not messaged yet. Only when that is done does he go looking for more.

Search belongs in that last slot. A man who spends his evening searching for coffee lovers while three good conversations sit unanswered has the order backwards. Answer the women who are already talking to you, then go and find the next ones.