SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 14 (AFP) - This Valentine's Day, 35-year-old Peter Henig will have no trouble finding a date.

Since he was elected one of the 10 most wanted bachelors of the Internet by the Women.com, Henig gets some 100 e-mails a day from women all over the world asking him for a date.

Henig is good-looking enough to be considered one of the most eligible bachelors in cyberspace, and as a senior editor at Red Herring, the bimonthly magazine of the tech world, he's certainly smart and successful.

Forget the yuppies of the 1980's, the hottest bachelors these days -- dot-com crisis or not -- are the Silicon boys.

"I didn't need a date that badly," said Henig while sipping a beer at a hip brewery located next to his San Francisco office. But when he was contacted by Women.com to be included in their "Top 10 Men of the Internet" contest, he eagerly accepted.

"I don't look at it as a dating machine. I just thought it could be fun," he said.

Henig had to share his secrets with everyone in cyberspace -- from "What's in your fridge?" to "How long was your last relationship and why did it end?"-- to help women decide whether he was "boyfriend material." Even his mom was interviewed.

"It's incredibly embarrassing. Do I really deserve all this attention? They are many good guys out there," he said.

In Silicon Valley, often dubbed as "valley of guys" for its high percentage of unmarried men, the venture capital gold rush may be over, but the dating industry is booming.

According to data compiled last year by the San Diego-based marketing firm Claritas Inc., Silicon Valley should be the place to be for single women looking for love. For every 318 single men in the city of San Jose, the heart of Silicon Valley, there are 288 single women.

Known for their lack of social skills, computer geeks are showing that they too can have a life, especially during the economic downturn for tech industries, when there's no real need to spend all that time in front of their computers.

"There is no recession in the dating industry," said Trish McDermott, vice president of Romance for Match.com, an online dating service whose clientele includes 61,000 single people in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"We think a big reason we grew so quickly in Silicon Valley is that there was a clear need among career-driven men to be able to connect with women, since the technology industry is very demanding on one's personal life," she said, alluding to her clients' long work hours.

According to Katherine Winter, who met her husband on Match.com and has joined him in running corporategigs.com -- an entertainment services company that serves Silicon Valley -- the end of the gold rush may not be bad news for the Silicon boys.

"These guys were working 20 hours a day and didn't have a chance to meet anybody. I think it's much better now that many of them have more time on their hands, especially if they can keep a positive attitude about their business," she said, adding that some of them may find it hard to be cheerful if they have lost a lot of money or even their jobs.

But for 27-year-old Russian-born Sergey Brin, who is the co-founder of leading search engine Google Inc., and who also made the list of "Top 10 men of the Internet," money shouldn't have anything to do with love.

"One thing that makes me uncomfortable is that women may want to date me for my wealth," he said, adding that ever since Women.com broadcast his face to the world he sometimes feels "like a piece of meat."

"Silicon Valley is not a great place for dating," he said, "because people don't socialize that much."

But from a woman's perspective, Winter disagrees: "Silicon Valley is definitely the place to be for single women, because of the quality and the number of men," she said. And, in a nod to the scenic San Francisco skyline, she said "the place is not only cutting-edge, it is also very romantic."