Dating used to be largely a matter of spending time with a love interest, discovering the good, the bad and the ugly in person. If you were lucky, friends helped fill in some of the blanks.
These days, the Internet - and the ability to check people out before they ever meet up - has forever changed the rules.
For better or worse, 'googling' your date has become standard practice.
'I often tell my friends that are still in the dating sphere to use the power of Google to their advantage,' says Ms Katie Laird, a 24-year-old Web marketing professional and self-proclaimed 'social software geek' from Houston.
The results can be enlightening, surprising - and sometimes, a little disturbing. So Ms Laird's advice also comes with a warning: 'Don't google what you can't handle.'
Hers is the voice of experience. In her dating life, she regularly did online research on her dates and turned up, among other things, 'bizarre' fetishes and a guy who was fascinated with vampires.
She also had to contend with an on-again, off-again boyfriend who googled her on a daily basis to try and track her every move. The story did end happily, however, when she met her future husband online.
In some ways, having a social networking page - or pages - has become the new calling card. It's a way for people to check out photos and find out what they have in common, even when they've already met in person.
That was the case for Mr Brad White, a 23-year-old recent college graduate in Chicago, who met his current girlfriend through friends at a bar - and immediately looked her up on Facebook.
'The commonality of our music taste and friends is what prompted me to ask her out,' he says, 'obviously, besides the attraction.'
'It seems like in contemporary dating, it's this elaborate dance between two people who already know a lot of what their date is talking about, but they can't admit it,' says Mr David Silver, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco who studies online culture.
In the end, Ms Danielle Martinetti says online research really only helps to a point, anyway. 'The crazy stuff usually becomes apparent on the actual date,' the 30-year-old New Yorker says.
