Dan Jacobs, the young man on a quest to prove that nice guys can get dates, plays guitar. Jacobs aims to go on 49 first dates, one in each of the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C.

The last we heard of Dan Jacobs, he was looking for a date. This was in the fall of 2004, when we wrote about him coming to Rhode Island, ready to randomly ask any woman to keep him company for a meal.

A Sensitive Guy on the Road: 50 Dates Across the States. That was the proposed title of Jacobs’ documentary. He aimed to personally discover what women really want in men. Unfortunately, Jacobs never got his answer. The documentary died in Virginia after 13 dates. Funding for the project ran out.

The idea behind the project continues, but in a new form: www.avanoo.com. It’s an Internet site of answers, although Jacobs prefers to call it “the world’s first community wisdom bank.”

Ask a question — about relationships, politics, whatever. Get an answer. And hear answers from only those you want.

“I can ask, ‘What’s the best pick-up line to use on a girl?’ ” Jacobs, 25, said by phone from his home in Venice, Calif. “Right now, there are two ways to get an answer. Go to an expert, say Dr. Phil or your mother. The problem is they only have one perspective and that perspective may not be relevant to you. The second option, which is a phenomenon of the Internet, is you go to the crowd. The problem with the crowd is you don’t know who’s in it. I don’t care what an 8-year-old thinks.”

On avanoo.com, Jacobs said he can “access wisdom from people I do care about, women, 18 to 25 who live in California and make $18,000 to $35,000, if that’s what I care about.”

Avanoo, which Jacobs said is a merge of a Finnish word meaning open and a Greek work meaning mind, aims to be a worldwide communal data bank of opinions and dispositions. People who log on can answer questions on an array of subjects, and retrieve answers to their own questions, and do so specifically by the age, gender, race, location, etc. of the respondents.

“You want to ask a community of people you care about,” Jacobs said.

Questions are yes-no and multiple choice in order for the most popular answers to be quantifiable. Jacobs co-founded this project with a 33-year-old computer expert who prefers to go by the pseudonym of Wilford. Their goal is to get 100 million “wisdom deposits” in the first 100 days of the site.

“After 50 Dates, people would come up to me and say, ‘You’re the expert. Tell us what women want,’ ” Jacobs said. “I could only generalize and give anecdotes and stereotypes. I said this is wrong. I had become another Dr. Phil, although younger and less bald.”

brourke@projo.com