Online quizzes can help you find anything, from a date to a pair of jeans that actually fit.

So it’s natural that when it’s time to choose a president, Web-savvy Americans turn to online quizzes to help them sort through the spin. To fill that need, we’ve invented the candidate matching tool, an interactive version of the charts of issues and positions that newspapers have been publishing for decades. You tell the quiz about your opinions, and the quiz sends back an answer that you can take right to the ballot box.

A lot of work goes into candidate matching tools. They come from experts and novices, think tanks and news outlets. But not all are created equal.

To help you choose which tool will help you choose, Political Safari has reviewed several of the top contenders. Visit them often before January 29, and you’ll be better informed than most. Happy quizzing!

GlassBooth: Election 2008
Source: GlassBooth.org, a nonprofit organization
Grade: A

We’ll go ahead and say it: GlassBooth has built the 2008 election’s killer app.

This elegantly simple quiz tells you which candidates you agree with and why. It starts by giving you 20 points to allocate among 14 issues. You get one question for each point, so you’ll only answer questions about issues that matter to you.

You rank your answers on a sliding scale from Strongly Oppose to Strongly Support. When you get your results, you can drill down through the overall agreement scores to see how well you align with your top candidate.

GlassBooth’s results seem to line up with reality by illuminating subtle differences among the crowded field of candidates. And its methodology makes it one of the first quizzes to reflect the compromises voters make. Some voters will ignore a candidate’s tax policy in order to support his or her plan for the Iraq War. Others won’t support anyone who doesn’t agree with their stance on abortion. These decisions are built into the GlassBooth quiz.

Incidentally, if you are a litmus-test voter, GlassBooth has built-in limits. If you allocate all 20 of your points to gay rights, the quiz can give you an answer after just four questions; do the same for the Iraq War and you’ll get 11.

If you allocate all 20 of your points to “Crime and Punishment,” you’ll get an AP English exam. On the Internet, that’s known as an “Easter egg.”

Just kidding, folks. Take this quiz - really.

Candidate Match Game
Source: USA Today
Grade: B

This quiz, presented in full USA Today technicolor, wins points for two innovations: It displays your results in real time, and it allows you to adjust the importance of different issues to your results after you see them. Where other quizzes leave you wondering why on earth you were matched with Mike Gravel or Tom Tancredo, this one shows you just how it happened. You can also adjust based on how you feel about the issues - if you feel that two questions on immigration are too many, just lower its importance.

USA Today’s effort goes a long way toward interactivity by letting the user shape the quiz. But it only goes up to 11 - 11 questions, that is. With such a short list, the results aren’t as nuanced as they could be.

Presidential Candidate Selector
Source: SelectSmart.com, a publisher of Internet quizzes
Grade: C-

This is the granddaddy of candidate selection tools. In Web terms, that means it was in use back in 2004. But even its current version is getting a little stale - it was last updated in August 2007.

It’s a thorough quiz with a lot of facts behind it, but its creators have opened the floodgates, letting in some oddball questions and far too many unknown candidates.

SelectSmart’s interface also cries out for an update. Ads clutter the page, and the sliders that let you set priorities are magnetically attracted to either “low” or “high.” In this quiz, as in real life, the only way to stay neutral on an issue is not to touch it.

Choose Your Candidate
Source: Washington Post
Grade: D

Sorry, Washington Post - Your gadget is slick and informative, but it’s not a great candidate matching tool.

The problem is that the choices here link directly to candidates, not to a continuum of opinion. This quiz asks you to read candidates’ statements on key issues and choose the one you agree with, without knowing who said it.

We appreciate the Post’s efforts to cut out the middleman and show voters the candidates’ opinions in their own words. But all that does is call attention to how often the candidates all say pretty much the same thing! (Check the Democrats’ responses on Social Security for a glaring example.) Furthermore, if a mainstream contender and a wingnut make similar statements, you may pick the wingnut based on clever phrasing alone.

Use this one as an encyclopedia of candidates’ policy statements, but don’t expect it to show you exactly how your beliefs match up.

Did one of these quizzes give you off-the-wall results? Do you know of a better quiz? Political Safari would love to hear from you. Please post your comments below.

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