You have a point. But look at the example you provide: meetup.com. It is hopelessly crude. The bad part is that it lets you connect with groups of people (clubs

You have a point. But look at the example you provide: meetup.com. It is hopelessly crude. The bad part is that it lets you connect with groups of people (clubs, etc.) rather than actual people. For example, when I enter Go, I get (among tons of unrelated content brought up by uninformed text matching) the Chicago Board Games Club. Cool, but I could have found this using Google (in fact searching for "Chicago go game" in Google turns up many better matches). This is definitely now what I need. As for your main point: My guess is that you are bonding with these people because you are sharing a common outlook to life, a common way of thinking. This would be hard or impossible to discern automatically using algorithms.