Case Study: SNAP Interactive boosts dating recommendations and user engagement with Neo Technology (Neo4j)

SNAP Interactive Conquers Online Dating with Neo4j

SNAP Interactive, maker of the AYI (Are You Interested?) social dating app, needed a way to surface 2nd‑ and 3rd‑degree friend connections to improve matchmaking and drive engagement. With a social graph of over 1 billion people and billions of relationships, the team found relational databases unable to efficiently compute multi‑hop friend‑of‑friend connections at scale.

SNAP migrated its social data into Neo4j, using native graph modeling, Cypher queries and Java-based import/traversal to enable real‑time multi‑hop recommendations. The change delivered faster queries (98% running faster than expected), reduced development time and costs, stronger dating recommendations and higher engagement, and measurable growth—relationships rose from about 7 to nearly 8 billion as AYI expanded to tens of millions of installs and secured strategic partnerships like Match.com.

SNAP Interactive