International dating service Badoo has come up with a short list of footballers, whose doppelgangers women most frequently look for on the application, exploiting the respective feature. Award-winning Cristiano Ronaldo tops the list, closely followed by no less renowned Fyodor Smolov and Lionel Messi. The fourth spot is taken by another heartthrob, Sergio Ramos, with Roman Zobnin, Gylfi Sigurdsson and France’s striker Olivier Giroud trailing just behind.
In terms of the amount of iconic footballer lookalikes featured on the Badoo application, Russia’s Spartak midfielder Roman Zobnin and Iceland’s Gylfi Sigurdsson lead the charge, with both having 1,309 doppelgangers on Badoo. Russian striker Fyodor Smolov closely follows the leaders with his 1,306 clones. Meanwhile, Portuguese star Ronaldo boasts the fewest doppelgangers (1,169) among Badoo’s football titans.
Fancy finding a "lookalike"?
The so-called “Lookalike” feature became available to the social network’s users last year, as an innovative computer vision mechanism exploited in the application made it possible to globally search for people with similar looks. The algorithm is fairly simple: users type in the name of a celebrity (for instance of a favorite football player) or pick one from an automated list suggested by the system. The same applies to searching for users’ friends’ lookalikes among those registered on Badoo.
Badoo is a major international social network, developed by Russian entrepreneur Andrei Andreev in 2006. It now boasts nearly 380 million registered users around the world, which surpasses the US population.
As the championship is in full swing for the first time on Russian soil, stats suggest that not only men are fully into the high-profile sporting event, but women too: 43 percent of the fair sex aged 18-30 eagerly watch matches and follow updates on their favorite players.
A week before the World Cup kickoff, Badoo analysts recorded a 16.7 percent spike in daily registrations in Russia. The figure suggests that users are increasingly poised to meet new people despite the tight schedule of events and matches. Badoo has also identified a rise in the number of people using the doppelganger search function, which enables them to find top celebrity lookalikes among the platform’s users.
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