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How To Find Someone’s Profile on Tinder

How To Find Someone’s Profile on Tinder

Tinder is one of the world’s leading dating sites, and is a great place both to look for that special someone and to look for casual fun. The way the app works is simple: users register a profile with a biography, some pictures, and a few details about themselves like their age, career, and location. Then the app presents each user with potential matches in their local area; users swipe right or left to indicate their interest, or lack thereof. If two people each swipe right on one another, then they are informed of the match and they have the chance to chat. It’s a simple system.

The system fails, however, when you want to look for a specific person. Maybe you know that a particular person of interest is on Tinder in your area and you want to match with them as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Tinder does not provide any way to search out someone on the site…or does it?

In this article I will show you a couple of ways that you can use to narrow down your search parameters so that you have a greater chance of seeing (and being seen by) your profile of interest.

Dreaming the Impossible Dream

There is one thing you should understand before you start looking, and that is that Tinder makes some matches impossible to make. The way the system works, only people who are potentially of interest to one another will ever see one another’s profile. For example, let’s say that person A is 28 years old and says they are looking for someone between the ages of 25 and 30. Person B is 29 years old, and is looking for someone between the ages of 30 and 35. These two people will never match with one another or even see one another’s profile. Person A would be interested in person B, but person B wants someone 30 or older and person A is too young. They will not see one another’s profiles, even though one of them would be interested in the other, because there’s no possibility of reciprocal interest.

Accordingly, if you yourself do not meet the parameters that the target of your search has entered into the app, then there’s nothing you can do to find them. Tinder won’t show you to one another until they change their parameters to include people like you.

Edit Your Preferences

Tinder doesn’t let you search by looking for interests, or employment type, or keywords. There are only three things you can specify you’re looking for: gender, location/distance, and age. However, if you are looking for someone in particular and if you know anything about that someone already, this can be enough to narrow your search enormously. Here’s how.

Normally, when we go on Tinder we set our parameters pretty broadly, other than the gender we want. We set our maximum distance for matches to be as large a distance as we’re willing to travel for a date, and we set our age range to the broadest possible spectrum that we could be attracted to. This usually gives us a large pool of potential matches.

These parameters will bring in a lot of potential matches.

But for purposes of finding our target, we don’t want as large pool. We want as small a pool as we can get while still including our desired match. That way, when we go to review potential matches and start swiping, we will find our target person quickly, because they are one person among just a few potential matches.

So there are two pieces of information about your desired match that you really need to know in order to make this work: their age, and their physical location at various times of the day. (So their home address, workplace, school, etc.) Then you want to match those criteria as exactly as possible.  Note that Tinder won’t let you set your age range to just one number; you have to give it a range of at least 5 years to work with. You might want to experiment with this number, particularly if you think your desired match might be fudging their age a bit on the site.

(Don’t forget that people can lie on Tinder.)

This one is a LOT narrower.

  1. Go to your Tinder “home page” by tapping the person icon in the top menu.
  2. Tap Settings.                                                                                                
  3. Set your age range and distance appropriately.
  4. Start swipe-searching.

Note that it is your *actual location* that Tinder uses in order to figure out distances. So if you set your distance to 1 mile to look for your next-door-neighbor, but he or she is actually ten miles away at work, then they aren’t going to show up on your searches. You need to physically travel to be close to the person you are looking for.

Change Your Location (Only With Tinder Gold or Tinder Plus)

Alternatively, if you’re looking for someone in another city (where it would be a little inconvenient to travel to visit), you can change your location if you have Tinder Gold or Tinder Plus. You can only set it to the desired city, so you’ll have to leave your distance field pretty large to find your match.

  1. Tap Location (iOS) or Swiping In (Android).
  2. Tap Add a new location.                                    
  3. Enter new location.

(Want to prevent someone from finding your profile on Tinder by location? Check out our tutorial on hiding your location from Tinder.)

Patience Will Get You Everywhere

Now that your preferences are set, there’s only one thing left to do. Start swiping until you come across the person you’re looking for. The more specific your location preferences, the better. Of course, doing this is not for the faint of heart, especially if you live in a high population area. But it will get you results…eventually.

Wait, Tinder Uses Usernames?

If you’re not interested in taking the time to swipe through dozens of profiles, then consider this approach. When you first sign up with Tinder, it doesn’t prompt you to select a username (and no we’re not talking about the first name that other users see when they are swipe-judging you). However, you can snag a username and Tinder will apply it to your very own profile URL. If you do this, then people may be able to search for you using this URL. But they’d have to know your username to guarantee that they’d find you.

Getting a Username

Curious about how to get your own username?

  1. Go to your profile settings.
  2. Scroll down to Username under Web Profile
  3. Tap Username.
  4. Type your username in the field provided after tinder.com/@
  5. Tap Confirm.                                                                        

Try typing the URL tinder.com/@[your username] into your web browser. You should be faced with your own Tinder profile.

Searching for a User

If you know the user’s username, then the rest is easy. If you don’t, then it’s time to start brainstorming. You can try their actual first name of course. However, you might want to try and find them on other more searchable social media sites (like Facebook). What usernames do they use on Twitter or Instagram? Try those.

At the end of the day, though, the best way to make matches on Tinder is to just use the service the way it was intended. That starts with creating an amazing profile and pictures! Your chatting skills are also relevant.

Do you have any suggestions or tips for finding a specific person on Tinder? Share them with us in the comments below if you do!

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One thought on “How To Find Someone’s Profile on Tinder”

D says:
Are you able to go into someone’s Instagram and figure out their password? If so, could you do that for me?

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Robert Hayes

Mar 29, 2019

Robert is a freelance editor and writer living in Colorado.

132 Articles Published

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