Can the Cranky Consumer
Find Love on the Internet?

SBF (single black female) with impressive-sounding journalism job seeks painless way to post a personal ad on the Internet.

Taking out a personal ad was once considered the last resort of the desperate and lonely. But thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, more singles are turning to Web sites to find mates. Close to 34 million people visit personals Web sites, according to Jupiter Research, an Internet market-research firm. Interest has increased even in the past year: The average user now spends 13 hours a month on the sites, up from nine almost a year ago, Jupiter says.

With at least 30 different sites devoted to personal ads, it seemed time for us to sample the wares. We dusted off a great snapshot, penned a modern-day ode to single life and joined five online dating sites. We didn't grade the sites on whether they could find us a husband -- that seemed excessive -- but simply on how easy they were to use.

All the sites offer the same basic economic proposition: You post ads free of charge, but if you want to contact another person on the site, you have to pay the monthly fees, generally $20 to $25. Beyond that, though, the sites vary in everything from ambience to the depth of the profiles.

Several times, we had our heart broken -- by the sites, not the dates. Lavalife.com tried to set us up with guys from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, even though we said we wanted to meet "local" men (i.e., in the New York area). Yahoo Personals took a whole three days to post our ad, while some other sites were able to do it in just one.

Our favorite site was Match.com, the granddaddy of Internet dating, with an estimated 3.25 million profiles and a highly active subscriber base. One big draw: its "Venus" option, which serves up a ready-made list of possible matches based on answers to detailed questions -- from the type of home you would like to live in, to the humor you laugh loudest at. Every week, you get a new list of potential partners.

Match.com was also more efficient than some of the other services. For example, when someone responds to your ad, most of the sites we visited send you a generic e-mail telling you that a message is waiting. To view the message, you then have to log onto the dating site. But Match.com sends the responses directly to your real e-mail address so you can open them in a single click.

Yahoo Personals may be the second-most-visited personals site, but we didn't quite get the attraction. To make sure their users feel comfortable, all sites patrol for pictures or text that are unsavory, misleading or dangerous. They reserve the right to reject nude pictures or photos of celebrities or animals. So we submitted three pictures: two of this reporter and an amusing photograph of a dog wearing a woman's wig. Not only did Yahoo take the longest to vet the ad, but in the end, it let the pooch slip through. A Yahoo spokeswoman said the photo slipup was "an isolated incident."

If ambience were all that mattered, Lavalife, the cyber equivalent of a velvet lounge, would be the winner. The Canada-based concern touts itself as the place "where singles click." It offers three categories to peruse: "dating," "relationship" and, for those who aren't big on formalities, "intimate encounters." But Lavalife has a couple of downsides. Other sites allow visitors to narrow their geographic search to as little as five miles. At Lavalife, a "local" search is defined as within 100 miles of a particular ZIP Code. So, when we searched the Brooklyn area of New York City for dates, we wound up with personals from places like Telford, Pa., and Chicopee, Mass. That wasn't the only mismatch: Though a spokesman for the site says at least 80% of the profiles are American, we kept stumbling into Canadians.

With dating sites, we noticed there is a fine line between being inquisitive and being nosy. Matchmaker.com is the Jewish mother of the online dating scene. After eliciting the standard information (age, height, race, educational level, etc.), the site wanted to know, for example, whether we had ever had a homosexual experience.

Spring Street Networks, which operates personal-ad sites for several newspapers, magazines and online publications, has figured out that personal-ad sites should be light and breezy. They have kept pesky questions to a minimum. One big gripe, though: no photos when you browse through the ads. All that is initially displayed is the person's screen name and a short headline intended to entice someone to click for more information. (A sample headline: "Reality is a sandwich I did not order.")

Write to Eleena de Lisser at eleena.delisser@wsj.com

Updated September 17, 2002