Need to understand matching better

I am using Dolphin for an unconventional, but somewhat cool, application.  I want to use the "dating" capabilities here for business and partner matching.  I have put different versions of this on some of my sites, but now I want to promote it as a key feature of one of them and realized I need to understand it better.

The site I am working on now has several fields that I would like to match.  There is an "industry" field where I would like to match members with other members in the same industry.  There are also both "seeking" and a "offering" fields and both of these allow multiple options.  In this case, I have set it so they match with their opposite - people "seeking" financial services - or marketing services, whatever, would want to be matched with people "offering" these services.

There are more fields I might like to match, but that is probably already pretty complicated.   My first question is really basic - and probably something I should know by now, but if you are matching on more than one field is their a logical AND between them or a logical OR?  In other words, if two members matched for the same industry (or most of them - remember it is multiple select) but they didn't match for the "offering" and "seeking" fields, would that reduce the number of matches they would get if I just matched them on industry alone?  To further confuse things, I really don't know what that "percent matching" does - especially on multiple select fields.  Does a low number decrease the number of matches, or increase it?   Any advice on how to set those numbers - should I set the most important fields at 100 percent?

As you can see, I am lacking some basic knowledge.  I really don't know how the algorithm works.  Any insight into this would be appreciated.

Rob

I am bumping this way old post, because I am still not sure I understand the matching function here.   As you can read in the post below, I am using this for business matching, and am  not even completely sure if when you match on two different fields if it means there is a logical "AND" between them, or what it means.  Also, I'm not sure what the "percent matching" means or does.  If I have two checkbox fields with 20 options each, and each member has 10 in common, then what does a "50 percent" match do - bring back all of them - or half of them?   As you can see, this gets pretty complicated when you are matching different fields, so I am not looking for brilliant answers - just the thoughts and experience of people here who have played with this function.  Is it documented anywhere, by any chance?

Also, and this is why I decided to bump this.  Where exactly is the "percent matching" displayed'?   I remember it on previous versions and I liked it, but it is not on my current install.   I have the setting checked in the admin area, I just can't find the display.  It is not gone, is it? 

Hi Rob, The lower the percent number, the greater the number of matches. 100% would have to be a perfect match.

Thanks for responding Stewart - this is the second or third time I have posted about this and have never gotten a response    Possibly not one here is even trying to use the matching beyond its basic functionality here.   I am still trying to figure out the interplay when you are matching on more than a few fields - some people here must be doing that.  

As I mentioned, I have two checkbox list fields on my site I am matching on my site: "industry" which I have set at an 80 percent match with the same "industry" field on other profiles; and two checkbox fields "seeking" and "offering" which match with each other.  For example, if someone is seeking "financing" I want them to be matched with someone who is offering "financing".   In addition to the industry field, I set this one to match at 50 percent since it is a list where people can get have more than one "seeking" or "offering".   On my profile, at least, this has returned too many matches.   I got 103 matches and there are only 135 members in the system right now.  

What I did then was crank the match percent way up to 80 percent for the "seeking" and "offering" fields, and it didn't change a thing - I still have exactly 103 matches.  Anyone have any idea what might be going on?   Is it because it is a checkbox list that there are too many variables? - or does the matching only happen on registration or something like that (that would suck).  Again, I am just trying to "grok" how this thing works as it is apparently not documented.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Rob

p.s. I am still looking for that list that shows the percent match - where the hell is it?   That might help me decipher it.   If that is at a url I could replace with my domain name could someone clue me in- I know I have seen it.