Yahoo Free Personals Review

Quick Yahoo Overview Last Reviewed: Jan 2003
Basic Membership Cost:	FREE
Countries Served:	US/Canada. Membership is large.
Types of Relationships:	Hetrosexual, Gay, Lesbian.
Key Membership Features:	Post your profile, photos, greetings (free) Browse and Search with advanced matching criterias (free) Message Center, Email. (initiating contact requires subscription)
Premium Membership Benefits:	Allows you full communication with members. See site for current price.
Pros:	It's Yahoo - safe, secure and trusted by many. Site itself is well-designed and fast-loading. Searching and browsing is excellent, there are lots of little extra features that add to the service like voice/video greetings and interactivity.
Cons:	1-month full membership bit pricey.
Rob's Rating:	8 / 10

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Joining Yahoo Personals

This service allows you to browse and search the free personals ads and post your own.

You can start by simply entering whether you seek man or woman, age range, location (in the US or Canada). For instance, I entered ladies in Los Angeles aged 23-30 and it brought up over 800 matches. But this was just a basic search. In reality you'd want more refinement and sure enough, yahoo offers an advanced criteria search.

To do this, you log in with your yahoo id (if you don't have one, you can join yahoo for free and get an id).

In advanced search mode, you can provide details about your ideal match - including nearness to you, age, height range, appearance, family, personal and professional attributes. This is one of their best features.

When you check the attributes it offers 3 choices for each (must have, nice to have, doesn't matter). On most personals pages, little help sections appear on the right side of the page so you can easily understand what some terms mean. Another excellent feature!

This is a detailed match, and even includes sections like 'group affiliations - vegeterians, disabled, students etc', political views and astrological signs. For me, these are superflous, but for many they are important search criteria that other sites don't even bother with. The interests section is slightly sparse. Maybe if they included another sub-section this would help people find even better matches.

You can also set up your own profile to help with matching. A good feature of yahoo is that once you enter your profile you can get them to email you close matches, thus saving you time, but I'd still recommend browsing as that's a major part of the fun! Another good feature is that once you've logged out and return a few days later, it shows you recent matches to any saved profile you have. Nice one!

With advanced searching, the results become more refined and a match-scale shows you as a % how close a match they are to you and your interests. This is well presented and easy to understand. You can then view the profiles of matches who take your fancy, read more about them and maybe consider subscribing so you can contact them. You can also act as a matchmaker for your friends by finding people and forwarding the link.

To initiate contact does require cost - you can subscribe to yahoo personals using one of 3 packages:

1 month for $24.95
3 months for $49.95
12 months for $99.95

The Yahoo Personals Site

You can post your free personals advert on yahoo in 7 easy steps. With millions of users yahoo is becoming one of the biggest dating services online. They also offer a personal mailbox that allows you to track messages that you send and receive. Clearly a lot of thought has been given to finding mutual matches. The steps include:

About You - if you've already entered this information as part of a search then it is stored, so you can leave it as is or fill it in again.

Your Match - similarly, if you had searched before and filled in the details then this is saved - you can edit it or leave it as is.

(the continue button is at the bottom of the page - maybe they could move it to the top if you had already entered this data, saving the extra scrolling...)

Title & Description - enter the 'hook' line, the title of your ad, description (profile) about yourself, and one for the person you are seeking.

Photos - upload up to 5 photos - quite generous really, compared to some services.

Conversations Starters - this allows you to suggest questions that potential matches might answer when they reply to your ad. This is a great idea. There are 50+ to choose from...

Preview and Post - if you're happy, post it, if not save it and edit it later.

Additional Ways to Post a free yahoo personal ad

Voice Greeting - There is also handy feature of being able to record a voice greeting. So after posting your ad, write down what your greeting will be, practice it a few times - maybe run it past a friend or two, then when you're ready, enter the phone number and the yahoo personals system will call you and ask to record your voice greeting. This will also increase the chances of people reading your ad - putting a voice to a face ads makes more of an impression than we may think.

Video Greeting - As an alternative to voice greetings, you can even record a video greeting. You are allowed 30 seconds to give a short description, maybe where you're from, what you do, things you like or you could even tell a very short funny story about yourself. The key is to plan it - maybe come up with a few alternatives and run them by a couple of your friends. Always remembering to smile, you can use your webcam to record and submit your video greeting. So now, potential matches can read your profile, listen and get a glimpse of your real personality.

Yahoo Personals Verdict

Yahoo personals is a fast-loading, very thorough, well thought out site, with a wide range of features all easily navigatable.

It's great that you can post your ad and browse for free, but to start to contact others you have to join up. At $25 for one month, that's slightly on the steep side, but you are free to contact as many people as you like, which is important.

If after checking the site out and browsing it for a while you feel it would be ideal in meeting new people, then maybe the 1 year subscription at $99 is far better value for money. You may even find 'the one'...

Rob's Rating - 8/10 - Recommended.

Click here to join Yahoo Personals for Free

Review written by Rob Paul:

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