How online dating sites work

There are literally hundreds of personals sites on the internet. Most of them are garbage. To find a good personals site, just go to Google.com and start searching. Some search terms you may wish to try are 'personals', 'free personals', 'dating', 'matchmaking', 'dating site', etc. You will be given a large list of sites. Some dating sites are niche-specific. For example one site might be for people looking for just sex, another might be for people who only want serious relationships. Then there are personals sites that are even more specific, like sites that specialize in 'republican singles', or things like that. Our advice is to ignore any niche type site, and definitely ignore the sex personals sites, unless that is what you are looking for of course. We would suggest a more general purpose personals site, like this site for example   Here you will find people looking for all kinds of things. This ultimately gives you more choices. There are other general purpose dating sites out there, feel free to check them all out. You will probably come to like only 1 or 2 and stick with those.

Most online dating services work basically the same way. Each one has a database of members. These members have profiles that describe themselves (perhaps the term is personal ad, personality profile, or something like that on other sites, but they mean the same thing). These profiles have physical descriptions, along with a section where the member can type a couple paragraphs about themselves, and who they are looking for. They also have photos, so people can see what someone looks like. Not everyone posts a photo, most in fact choose not to (big mistake, we'll explain later). The choice is theirs. Each site has different looking personal ads. One may have a feature that another doesn't, and vice versa. But by and large they are all very similar in look and feel.

When you visit a personals site, you will usually be presented with a search box. This will include different search options. 'I am a', 'Looking for a', 'Between ages X and Y', 'Within X miles of my code'. These are the basic search parameters that you will see. You will say what you are looking for "Man looking for woman, etc.", what age range you want, and what area you want to search in. Feel free to run a search. Start out pretty broad. The more specific you are the less matches you will get back, especially if you live in a rural area. When you run a search, most sites will request that you join first. Basically they want you to add your profile to their system before they let you use the site. You may be thinking "but I don't want to add my profile, I just want to check out the site." All personals sites require one thing to be successful: members. And lots of them. It really is not unreasonable for them to require that you are a member before being able to use the site. It is usually extremely easy to join, taking just a couple minutes. Some of the giant sites don't make you join at first, but after you run a couple of searches they will eventually ask you to.

Next: Quick signs of a bad dating site