CYBERSPACE – Search engine pioneer Lycos is taking the online dating game to a new level.The company today will launch Lycos Dating Search, a search engine that will allow the internet’s lonely to search through millions of online profiles from a variety of different online dating services. The initial launch will include profiles from LoveAccess.com, Matchmaker.com, True.com, Tickle and iMatchup.com. Lycos is currently in discussions with additional online dating companies that may be added in the future.

“We did research last year and it revealed that [internet] dating customers want a robust and efficient way for searching for dates online,” says Curt Degenhart, a senior product manager with Lycos.

Lycos stands to profit from the site through a combination of online ads and through listing fees and commissions that will be paid to Lycos from its dating site partners whenever a sale is generated through use of Lycos Dating Search.

The model is not without is critics. Jason Dowdell of WebProNews.com wrote that the Lycos Dating Search model is making a number of mistakes:

“They’re charging a fee in order to be guaranteed your site is included in the search index. This means they don’t trust their crawler or dating search algorithm enough to guarantee the quality of results and they’re going to put the burden on the site owners to contact Lycos about getting their site included,” wrote Dowdell.

The new dating search service will offer a number of advantages that could prove quite popular to the online dating population.

A free service, searches will be shown only a portion of profiles from the Lycos site, but can click over to the original dating site in order to view the complete profile. Even if a participating dating site generally does not allow non-members to view the complete profiles, those surfers arriving from the Lycos dating site will be able to view the complete profile without becoming a member and without paying any fees.

“There’s a lot of shopping around with dating sites, both before and after choosing a site to join,” said Degenhart. “Now users can browse and search profiles with no registration requirements.”