Match.com are famous for their success rate. The first online agency to advertise on TV, they are the biggest online dating agency. Numbers should present no problem with this agency; on average, it should have the highest number of people local to you of all the online dating sites. So, what did I think of it?

As with most dating agencies, match.com is typical in the regard that you can put up your profile for free. The first page of registration gives you a box to click to opt out of spam, so don’t forget to do that. You are then asked to enter your local details. I had trouble locating my county; the official name of the county in which I live changed in 1996 to be the same as that of the city, Cardiff, and match.com only list the old county name, South Glamorgan. This does not represent a problem, however, as you can easily indicate that you want search results within a specific radius of your postcode address. This is certainly more sensible for me, as I live close to the border of the county, so matches from the adjacent county are certainly not out of the question for me. If I used the search by region option, there would be no way to indicate my interest in profiles from people living in neighbouring Gwent.

You’re next asked what you do for fun, what you would do on a date, your favourite things and for the last thing you read, and you can type up to 250 characters (letters, numbers, spaces and single punctuation marks) in each box. On the next page, you indicate smoking and drinking habits, profession, annual income (which you can choose not to answer if you prefer), who you live with, and preferences regarding children. The next page asks for your ethnic group, your religion, your level of education, spoken languages (remember to tick English!) and political views.

Next, it’s on to the section where you indicate who you’re looking for. You can choose people with photos only, physical characteristics, ethnic group, religion, education level, spoken languages, how much money they make, whether smoking and drinking are acceptable, whether any prior marital relationship exists, whether there are kids in tow, and whether your match wants to have any. You can also rate the importance of these factors as unimportant, somewhat important, or vital.

Finally, you’re asked for a description of yourself and your perfect match. I came unstuck here because I’d already entered this information earlier under what I did for fun, but that was easy to edit later. You’ve also got 128 characters to play with for a dating headline. Note that only the first 22 characters of this headline will be displayed in the initial search box, along with the first 30 words or so of your main description, so these are the impact zone to be considered when you are preparing your profile in order to get people to click through and see your profile in full.

When it comes to uploading a photograph, match.com say they would like a photo of at least 300 x 400 pixels in size, and you have up to 5Mb to play with, so go wild! You can upload up to six photos, five of which can only be seen by subscribers according to the information shown, but I found that I was able to view several photos of someone whose profile I viewed as a non-subscriber. Profiles and photos have to be manually approved before they become visible to others on the site, so you should see no surprises such as bad language or inappropriate sexual terms used in the profiles. Do upload a photo; you’ll find that you get far less people viewing your profile if you don’t, because the search option defaults to showing people with photos only. Most of the photos on this site were of very good technical quality, and the match.com staff make sure that the main search page shows a cropped version of the photo, with just your face showing.

The site seems pretty basic when it comes to what you can add to your profile. There are services that allow you to add an audio sound-bite and even video footage to your profile; these facilities are unfortunately not available from match.com.

In terms of reach, match.com seems quite respectable. Searching for women aged 18 to 30 living within five miles of my postcode region, but otherwise unqualified, produced 240 matches. You should certainly find someone reasonably local to you who is a reasonable match using this service, unless you’re choosy, and in that case you would need to analyse your expectations. Of course, the further you are prepared to travel, the more selective you can afford to be!

Search options are quite comprehensive, including the ability to filter your search by any specified attribute, and also you have the ability to search by looking for keywords; this would certainly help to find somebody whose interests match yours. You can also sort by activity date, which means that you can rule out people who rarely use the service and are therefore not actively searching for love. Of the 240 matches in my search, 25 used the service in the previous 24 hours; 7 within the previous 3 days; 8 within 5 days; 9 within 1 week; 14 within 2 weeks; 5 within 3 weeks and the rest last used the service more than 3 weeks ago. I suggest sticking with the people who have used the service within the last week, and obviously you’d get a quicker response from the daily site users.

You do have the situation common with many online dating agencies that not all visible profiles will be from subscribers to the service. However, non-subscribers can still receive and read email. To get the most from your subscription, I suggest you sign up for a free email account somewhere to use solely for dating email, include that email address in the first message you send someone, and ask them to reply to that email address. These accounts usually have blocking facilities for specific email addresses should you wish to receive no further email from someone, and if somebody does pass on the address to lots of junk mailers, you can easily alert anyone who you wish to remain in contact with that your email address is changing, stop using that address, and sign up for a new one. Dating agency safety FAQs say not to do this, but they say that because they want both people to subscribe to the service.

You might even be successful without subscribing to match.com! You can send “winks” to people you like for free. They are then likely to look at your profile. If they like what they see, they may well drop you a line, and if they’ve followed the advice in this review, they may give you an email address to contact them at!

If you do decide to subscribe, costs seem reasonable, except for the one-month subscription option; indeed, the six-month option looks attractive. If you’re serious about finding somebody, bear in mind that you’re probably going to be looking for longer than one month. Also, specifically for UK users, if you create a profile with a photo and contact at least five members per month for six months, then if you have not found love at the end of that time, match.com will give you another six month subscription for free!

I set up a profile yesterday in order to write this review, and I will add comments as time goes by, indicating how I’ve got on with match.com. I will be comparing the response rate of my profile to that seen from other online dating organisations. Please feel free to add your comments if you have used them!

I wanted to start a list of free dating services that people can try out, including short reviews of each. I define “free dating service” as any service that allows you to contact any of its members without any requirement for you to pay for the service. Additional services can be available from them for a fee. These services are usually paid for by showing you advertisements. It’s just that there are so many websites that will lead you to believe that a dating service is free, when in actual fact you can put up your profile for free, but then you have to pay to contact its membership!

OkCupid is the best service that I have tried, both from a point of view of the size of its established membership, and its excellent matching system. It also qualifies as the most unusual; instead of asking you questions about your hair and eye colour, it asks you insightful questions about yourself and what you would like to see in a potential match. Much of the site is designed by its users. Read my OkCupid review here.

The next service that I recommend is PlentyOfFish. It’s a more typical online dating site in terms of the questions it asks and has a less complex matching system, but in addition to being a dating site, it includes a very active forum. Read my PlentyOfFish review here.

For UK users, LoopyLove technically complies with the definition, but practical use of the site as a non-payment site is unfeasible. You have to read and click on emailed ads to increase your personal number of credits in order to send and/or receive messages, and they don’t send you enough of these ads to allow you to do this quickly enough. My LoopyLove review is here.

Cyberdating is the next service to qualify. You can even send messages to people without adding your own profile with this service! I have not reviewed this site.

21Date.com also qualifies as free. This seems to be an up-and-coming service, and at the moment has a small subscribed user-base. It may be worth a try, though!

Please add any further information about sites that meet the definition of a free dating service as comments here. Note that I will be moderating them, and any comments that refer to a dating service that is not free will not be published here. If you wish to promote a paid dating service on this site, you can do so by adding a comment to the online dating service reviews article. Thanks!

PlentyOfFish. Free online dating. Are there really plenty of fish on the site, or is it worth what you pay for it?

My first impression of this site was that it was really easy to set up a profile. It’s a two-page sign-up process; the first page asks you what you’d like to be called, what country you are from, your password, and similar. The second page is where you add information about yourself; the form is not very long, and you are asked not only about yourself, but also what you would do on a first date, and for a list of your interests. You are also asked for your photo. You don’t have to upload a photo, but it’s always recommended to do so, if you have a good one; you may find our article on good profile photos of interest. The image is sized to 179 x 250 pixels, generous compared to most dating sites, and a small PlentyOfFish logo is superimposed at the bottom-left.

My preferred headline is in the form of a question, and I noticed that the question mark was stripped from it. It appears that there is a size limitation of 40 characters for your headline. I changed it to a shorter statement with an exclamation mark and that worked fine.

On to the most important part of the site: the search. Do they have people in my local area? Although the site accepts members from many parts of the world, it is geared towards USA residents, so I suspect that there is a greater inventory of US profiles than for other countries. I was shocked to find no profiles within 100 miles of where I live. I didn’t believe that could be right, and I decided to remove my post code from the “Zip Code” box. This did the trick, but there were still only 37 profiles of women between the ages of 18 and 30 within 100 miles of Cardiff, the city in which I live. It soon became apparent that all of these profiles were in fact Cardiff residents, so it appears that the search within 100 miles of your target area doesn’t work for UK residents, and I would hazard a guess that it only works for USA searches. Indeed, when I searched for Newport results (the nearest city to Cardiff, about 10 miles away), I got a whole different search page, giving 17 more results. This shouldn’t stop you using the service; it’s just something to bear in mind.

Photos tend to be squashed either vertically or horizontally on this page; I don’t believe I saw any photos that had the right aspect ratio. I would suggest that if you’re uploading your own photograph, you aim to use the right size for your main profile page (179 x 250, as stated above). The pictures on the search page are 75 x 75 pixels. It’s a shame they didn’t maintain the aspect ratio, as then the pictures would not have looked squashed. You can upload up to eight pictures. Photos are reviewed for nudity, and people who upload nude photographs get their account deleted.

By going to your profile page, you can also search for people that share your interests by clicking on links there. This didn’t seem to be very useful, as the search returned worldwide results, and it wasn’t possible to filter it to local results.

Some profiles use crass language on this site, so expect to see it. There’s no way to report it. If you’re looking to avoid bad language completely, the only way to do it is to use a paid dating service; see our review category for more details.

You will not be asked for any money to use this service. It’s entirely sponsored by advertising. The advertising is unobtrusive, consisting of high-quality AdSense ads; the same as used by this site. Sites running AdSense are not allowed to use intrusive pop-ups or pop-unders that are the bane of many a web browsers’ experience.

PlentyOfFish has extremely active forums that are moderated by volunteers. If you participate in these, you get further exposure; your photo is shown to the left of each post. There are well over a million posts on the complete site at the time of writing, and they cover everything from dating tips, though cooking and humour, to politics!

I will add comments detailing the number of responses that I get on the live profile that I’ve set up. In the mean time, I would suggest that the site is well worth registering for! Whether you write a profile now or later, you need to spend the time to do that, so it’s worth trying out your profile on a free site first. If you try PlentyOfFish or have tried it, feel free to share your experiences here!