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*Note: Yahoo! Personals merged with Match.com in June of 2010. For more details, visit Yahoo!'s explanation.

With a slick advertising campaign of real members and a large user base in both the US and Canada, Yahoo Personals looks like a solid dating site on paper. And although it is true that their terms of service, refund policies ans site structure are straightforward, accessible and reasonable, the only features Yahoo Personals offers are the most basic ones that most sites have been offering for years.

Overview from Yahoo Personals

"Yahoo! Personals helps you build meaningful relationships with a large community of people like yourself. You can make new friends and find dates through the Yahoo! Personals network of online personal profiles."

What a Yahoo Personals Membership Includes

Unpaid Yahoo Personals members can sign up, create a profile, search for members and send generic Icebreaker messages. Paying users can do all of this as well as send instant messages and emails. All Yahoo Personals members have access to "We Match" as well, which merely shows which members have answered basic demographic and tick box questions that are similar to your own. In my experience however, I found We Match not to be very accurate. I checked off that a smoker was a non-negotiable for me, and yet several Yahoo Personals members showed up in my We Match list as did numerous people well over my stated acceptable age range (some more than 30 years my senior).

Unique Features of Yahoo Personals

There were two things that I found unusual about Yahoo Personals, and both were more annoying than anything else.

Every time someone visits your profile during the first few weeks after you sign up, Yahoo Personals will send you a note saying you have mail. Unfortunately, that mail is just to tell you that someone took a look at your Yahoo Personals profile, and maybe they "flirted" with a generic Icebreaker message. For people in larger areas, this could mean a tremendous amount of emails from Yahoo Personals.

The second unique 'feature' of Yahoo Personals is the fact that the system asks for your real first name to identify yourself on the site, and not an anonymous, made-up handle. Therefore, next to your smiling face is your real name, for anyone on Yahoo Personals to see and put two and two together. In smaller towns especially, this may pose a problem and therefore I recommend using a pseudonym for this portion of the Yahoo Personals site should you choose to sign up for it.

Yahoo Personals Membership Fees

One month of access at Yahoo Personals costs $29.95. Buying three months at a time reduces the cost to $21.65 a month or six months for $14.99 a month - but both of these multiple month options are payable in advance, in full. Yahoo Personals also practices automatic billing, which means the membership term you pay for initially will be automatically billed at completion, unless you inform Yahoo Personals in advance to cancel. Additionally, there is a 72-hour cancellation policy, where users who are unhappy with the service can get a refund.

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