Take the Yahoo web portal and internet dating and you have Yahoo Personals, available with 15 country specific sites. If you’re a regular Yahoo user, the Personals page will be very familiar to you.

Let’s dig in;

You must have a yahoo mail account (yahoo.com or .ca, ymail or rocketmail) to create a profile. If you don’t already have a yahoo mail account, one can be set up from the profile creation page. Since your yahoo mail account and your yahoo personals account are accessed using the same user name and password, it can get a bit confusing going from page to page and it is particularly annoying to have your password requested multiple times without ever leaving the yahoo site.

The search function is top notch. Besides the usual age range and location searches, you can also specify ethnicity, height, body type, hair color, and many more criteria. Once you select any of these additional search parameters, you can mark them as “must have” or “nice to have”. This will come in very handy if you’ve done a basic search that returned a large number of profiles and you want to narrow it down, or if you’re just VERY particular in what you’re looking for.

You can make your profile “non-searchable” or hidden. Great if you’re going away on vacation or you think you’ve met someone (but hey it’s early days yet) and you don’t want to cancel your membership just yet, but you’d rather not be included in search results. You can also make your profile searchable on “partner websites” and although an example is given, it is not at all clear just what those websites are.

The profile section is easy to complete, and not overly long.

The help section is well designed and easy to use. If you cannot find an FAQ listed that relates to your issue, a keyword search is available.

The 5 star safety program is Yahoo’s assurance to its members that there really are people behind the scenes to screen all profiles for posting violations. Profiles are reviewed before they are searchable, so when you create a profile, it is posted right away, but it will not be made searchable until it has been verified. If you make changes to your profile, they may also need to be reviewed before others can see the changes.

The “corporate speak” such as Member guidelines, Code of conduct etc. are written in easy to understand English, not “legal speak”. For those who want all the legal nitty gritty, it’s there too.

Membership fees depend on the length of the term; $15.99/mo for 6 months, $19.99/mo for 3 months, and $29.99/month for a monthly membership. There is a “free” 7 day trial, but you still have to provide your credit card information to take advantage of it, and you will be billed for whichever plan you choose UNLESS you remember to cancel your account before the trial period ends. If credit card info is required, then as far as I’m concerned, it’s NOT free!