Good grief, I barely know where to start! I guess the easiest way is to open my MS Word program and find synonyms for the word awful!

Since I have to start somewhere, let’s begin with the name. SYL which is short for Search Your Love. The acronym itself puts me in mind of some horrible sexually transmitted disease, and the full blown version isn’t much better. If I’m going to “search my love”, I’d rather he were in the room with me so we could take our clothes off in front of a nice cozy fire and get busy.

The pages on this site are incredibly slow to load. It took easily between 30 seconds to two minutes between pages, which is incredibly irritating and just makes me want to go somewhere else. In the grand scheme of things, two minutes isn’t a long time, but in the online world, it’s an eternity.

The search function is an absolute joke. Apparently the developers are unable to count past fifty, since that’s where the age range stops. Whether you’re 50 or 85, SYL classifies you at 50+. So if you’re looking for a 60-65 year old guy, you’ll get more than you asked for. Past country, and in some cases, a city, there is no further geographical filter. There’s no filter for interests or relationship type, just sex, age range (limited), country, city and whether or not the profile should have a photo.

At first glance, it appears that this site has quite a lot of content. Once you take a closer look though, you’ll find that the content (for lack of a better word) is limited in scope, of very poor quality, and the most “recent” articles date from 2006. In internet terms, they’re from the Stone Age. It’s evident that the site is run by people for whom English is a second language, and they have not taken the time, nor spent the money, to ensure that the translation is up to par. Pages are littered with spelling and grammar errors, which, when all is said and done, is in keeping with the overall lack of quality on this site.

Where designed is concerned, the developers weren’t. Other than an okay logo, the site’s layout is generic without original or innovative concepts. It’s boring and unimaginative.

Site navigation is easy enough. I mean how difficult can it be to click on a tab? Where it bogs down is in the page load time as mentioned above.

Given all its shortcomings, and there are many, this site just feels sordid and more than a bit shady. Hey, you can even pimp your own photo and become a “leader”! According to the explanation you can “Become famous and promote yourself! The rules are simple. Make your bet higher then any of existent, and you’ll become a leader. Each minute you’ll be charged with 1 bet.” (see what I mean about the grammar!?). Each “bet” will cost you $1.00, and they’ll be more than happy to accept PayPal. Geez, I’ll sleep easier tonight knowing that, thanks. A scam is a scam is a scam. ‘Nuff said.

This site claims to have over 2 million members. A quick search through the profiles reveals that a lot of them are duplicates, and I recognized quite a few photos that were ripped off from modeling agencies websites. If you’re a legit user of this site, do yourself a favor; delete your profile pronto. There are a number of reputable free internet dating sites, but SYL sure isn’t one of them.