Christopher W.

POF could be perfect, but there was one very big drawback I experienced. I live in a rural area and if I wanted to search within 8 miles, there were "not enough matches". There were in fact over a dozen profiles within 8 miles, but POF would not allow me to view just those. If I expanded this to 10 miles, I no longer received the "not enough matches" warning, however my results were artificially expanded to include people from up to 20 miles away. If I set it to 15 miles, my results were artificially expanded to include women living 60 miles away! I am not exaggerating on that figure, that 60 miles is Mapquest confirmed. 59.6 miles if you want precision. I'm a more-than-full-time engineer and part time farmer. I do not have the time to make a 60 mile relationship work, nor do I have the time to comb through a thousand people to find the 20 who are within my range. Yes, the site is called "plenty of fish" as opposed to 20 fish, and they are trying to generate add revenue like any online business. It might not be conducive to this goal if customers only logged on briefly every once in a while to see if they had any new potential matches. Obviously they want you to troll the site late at night until you start to go cross-eyed. But it sure would be a heck of a lot more useful and less annoying if they did not bias the search results in this way. This is a key reason I use OKcupid more than POF, despite the fact that I like everything else on POF better. OKcupid's search algorithm is biased in the opposite direction, it tends to exclude some matches rather than include erroneous matches, but it works better for me because it doesn't waste as much of my time. Perhaps all of this is just the inherent plight of the rural online dater but it would sure be nice to see some changes!