Yahoo Personals Review
With speculation about the possibility of seeing Google Personal Ads, let’s review the search brand that got there first: Yahoo! Personals.
Yahoo Personals has been in the online matchmaking business about as long as anyone. In fact, I remember meeting someone about eight years ago through the service. At the time it had already become one of the top ways of meeting people online. I went on a date with a person I met through the site, but I ended up enjoying her parents’ company a lot more than hers. That’s the way it goes sometimes, although one quick look at the front page of Yahoo Personals these days shows the service has made a lot of positive changes in its effort to make successful matches.
While dating sites such as Date.com and Matchmaker.com start off with little more than a form for signing up, Yahoo Personals does a great job of showing off a lot of its features right off the bat. Visitors to the website can actually see what they might be getting themselves into. You can view more information about the sign-up process, safety measures, and dating articles featured on the website. There is also a spot with links to international versions of Yahoo Personals.
Once you click to begin signing up, you’ll be taken to a second page where everything is once again displayed right up front. Before entering the first thing about yourself, you’ll have another chance to see the features of Yahoo Personals reiterated. The pricing options are also right there, listed from $25.99 a month down to $13.99 a month for six months. This is slightly cheaper than the $29.95 per month charged by Date.com and Matchmaker.com, although those sites go all the way down to $9.99 a month if you sign up for a year with either of those.
A particularly noteworthy option is the ability to sign up for a fully featured seven-day account for free. There’s nothing better than a free tryout, although it can be a hassle to remember to close an unwanted account before it is charged.
Chances are, you already have signed up for that ubiquitous Yahoo ID for one reason or another. It’s a quick and painless process if you haven’t, and it’s also necessary before you can create a Yahoo Personals profile. Yahoo Personals users must also agree to a code of conduct before moving on to creating a profile. By agreeing to it, users are stating that they are single, and that they will be respectful and honest. It’s not realistically enforceable, but it is a nice gesture on Yahoo’s part.
Throughout the profile creation process, there is a bar that shows what sections are left to be filled out and how long it should take. In an interesting request, Yahoo wants members to use their real first names in their profile. Supposedly it makes communication between members more comfortable. Most of the required profile information is basic, but a few questions are related to sense of humor, TV interests, and ideal social settings. Before your profile creation is complete is, you are also asked to fill out a description of your ideal match.
After setting up your new profile, you’ll be able to start your search for matches, and you’ll see that the pool of profiles is huge. I haven’t come across any other online dating service that has so many profiles available. Of course, because the number of profiles is so huge, you will probably run across more old profiles. I mean the profiles themselves are old, not the people. Profiles of old people are perfectly fine if that’s what you’re into. There are also more profiles without pictures than you’ll find at many other dating sites.
Yahoo Personals has refined itself to be a quality middle-of-the-road option for online dating. Unlike eHarmony, Yahoo Personals does not stray into sophisticated scientific matching algorithms. It offers some basic automated matching help and more advanced searching than you’ll see at Date.com, but it doesn’t cost the time and money of online dating services like Great Expectations. It won’t be the right place if you’re looking for more or less than that kind of “medium-strength” service. Yahoo Personals also deserves credit for being highly transparent. The online matchmaker does a great job of letting you know what’s coming ahead of time, with the best example being the Yahoo! Personals 7 day free trial.
