But when using online personal ads, love seekers need to deal with awkward first dates, detecting when others aren't being completely truthful and the disappointment of rejection -- much like traditional courtship rituals, but with a monitor and keyboard as intermediaries.

Singles who try meeting others online might find that while these services can help fill their date books, they don't necessarily help in the search for The One.

Finding that someone

For Blaine Greenfield, 56, and Cynthia Greenfield, 52, both of whom re-entered the dating scene after divorce, Match.com seemed like the right way to find someone.

"It's the 2005 way of meeting people," Blaine said.

"I met some nice people, some not nice people," his wife said. "I went off for a while because it was pretty discouraging. ... In a way, there's something a little artificial."

They each harvested a share of anecdotes from the online dating scene. One woman asked Blaine to shave his mustache before their first date. One man unknowingly dated Cynthia and her friend at the same time -- sometimes on the same night, giving them the same gifts of three roses and using the same sweet talk on them both.

The Greenfields' advice: Don't look at every date as a possible life partner. Just have fun.

"If they just accept that they're going to meet someone nice, as opposed to 'You're going to meet somebody you're going to marry' ... it can be a nice process," Blaine said.

And don't judge too quickly. If Cynthia had done that, she would have stopped seeing Blaine when he told a borderline offensive joke over the phone before she had a feel for his sense of humor.

The next big thing

At Match.com, where there are six men for every four women, spokeswoman Kristin Kelly says online personals are the natural next step for a generation that grew up with computers.

"People who are twenty-something use their computer for all aspects of their life and don't think it's at all strange to use it to make social connections," Kelly said.

Because young adults today are more geographically mobile than their parents were, she said, many now live in areas far from where they grew up, and thus don't have the networks to meet people that they might otherwise have.

The more that technology influences daily life, the more acceptable it becomes to find love online. But though younger people are embracing Internet dating more (89 percent of Match's customers are under 50), people older than 50 are making up an increasing number of Match's customers, Kelly said. Most join at the suggestion of their adult children, but Blaine said he was following his friends' leads, and Cynthia said she just needed a new venue.

"I don't like bars, and the places I had been going to were pretty poor," she said.

In joining Match.com, they joined a trend that doesn't carry the stigma it once did.

"I think it's incredibly mainstream now," said Eric P. Straus, president and CEO of Cupid.com, where there are six women for every four men. "I think younger folks are very comfortable doing a lot of things online. ... Why not have an online dating site be one thing in your arsenal for meeting people?"

Straus said the average subscriber to any of the major personals services try three different services before picking one. Because most services let users browse profiles before they subscribe, most users will subscribe based on the profile of one particular person they want to meet, Straus said.

He said Cupid has one million members in the United States. One of them is Bob Harris, 41.

Harris, of Carteret, has used Cupid, American Singles and Yahoo to meet women. He's still looking for The One.

"I guess it's safer for people to meet via the Internet," Harris said, "but I'm still not meeting the kind of quality person I want to meet. I'm a little old-fashioned, old school. I'd just rather meet you in person."

Harris' stories include involvement with two women he dated who tried to set him up with their friends or relatives.

Punctuation, please

For Tracy Dacko, 34, of Bridgewater, the online dating scene became too time-consuming after a while.

"It became tiresome writing back and forth all the time," Dacko said. She quit Match.com after about a month, but then went back a year later to try again.

Without body language and nonverbal cues normally used to learn about people in the early stages, Dacko said she used e-mail messages to determine whom she wanted to continue communicating with.

"If anyone cursed in an e-mail, they were out. If anyone used all caps or didn't use punctuation: Don't bother."

Dacko said she met up with six or seven people, three of whom she went out with five or six times.

"Great people. ... They were nice enough people that I would feel comfortable (setting up with others)," she said. None of them quite clicked with her, though.

But she did meet one more man in February 2002.

"We went back and forth with a few e-mails, and he wrote really nicely," she said. "I could tell he was well-educated, and he took time to think about what he was e-mailing."

His name was Jason. He and Tracy got married in May this year.

When she told people where she met him, some were surprised.

"Older relatives said, 'Isn't that kind of risky?' But it's not. You know a lot more about them than if you were on a blind date.

"Overall, the people I met online were really nice, they were really truthful," Dacko said. "They were good people who were just in the same situation, where they weren't meeting people at work or other situations, and they were just looking for a different outlet."

"And I open the car door for her, too," says Dennis Barton, sitting in Roberts' condominium.

He's 63 and retired. She's 57 and a technical writer. Both of their marriages ended in divorce 25 years ago, and both Cincinnati-area residents have been single ever since.

In April 2004, Barton saw Roberts' profile on Yahoo! Personals and sent her e-mail. That led to more exchanges, the discovery of common interests, numerous dates and a relationship still going strong.

It's not obvious from the young faces featured on Internet pop-up ads, but the gray-haired generation has discovered online dating in a big way.

"It's rapidly growing among the 50-plus market. I know it's making inroads into the 60s, too," says Ron Geraci, special projects editor for AARP The Magazine.

Geraci, a former dating columnist at Men's Health magazine, presents how-to seminars focused on online dating in New York.

"Four years ago, it was all twenty-, thirty-, fortysomethings (in attendance)," he says. "Now the room is mainly filled with fiftysomethings. I've had people in their 70s come."

Internet research firm Nielsen//NetRatings says seniors are the fastest growing group of online users. Many look for love or friendship on the Web. Some 26 million people visited online dating sites in January, and 18 percent of them, or 4.8 million, were over age 55.

"Online dating isn't a stigma anymore," says Brenda Ross, relationship adviser for Date.com.

Date.com says sign-ups of members age 65 and older increased 78.5 percent from January 2004 to January 2005. Match.com, one of the biggest online dating sites, in January attracted 704,000 visitors age 55 or older, up from 606,000 a year earlier.

Several factors are at play, Geraci says. For one, divorce has created a large pool of older single people.

"A lot of them are making the decision to date again after a divorce," he says. "A lot have this question: Where do I start? Online dating is a way a person can, in somewhat of a spectator role, put their pinky toe into dating."

Geraci cites other reasons for online dating's rise in popularity among older people: The generation that didn't grow up with computers is becoming more familiar with technology. And people are staying active longer.

Jo Taylor, a 60-year-old Cincinnatian, was encouraged to give online dating a try by her daughter, who met her fiance online.

Alan Coleman, also of Cincinnati, needed no prodding. The never-married, 55-year-old retired schoolteacher likes being able to scan profiles, so he knows if he fits prospective dates' criteria.

The built-in advantage for the over-50 crowd: "Most of us are a little wiser, a little bit more discerning. And I think in my age group there's probably less game playing going on," he says.

But not always.

Taylor says she doesn't respond to anybody who doesn't post a photo. She says most of the eight or so online prospects she's met in person have leveled with her -- with one exception.

"He didn't use his own photo, and I haven't quite figured that out," she says.

Still, most people say the positives outweigh the negatives. Marge Roberts and Dennis Barton do.

They enjoy shared interests such as painting and attending art shows. They look forward to bicycling, picnics and kayaking.

Says Roberts: "If we met somewhere (in person), I might or might not have hooked up with him, because in a lot of ways, we're different. But in the basic, underneath things, we're the same."

And, Barton says, "We're still having fun."

Computer chimes substitute for awkward silences.

And Internet super sleuths curious to know what they're getting into are phasing out the blind date.

"You can get online to research a person and find out who they are before even meeting them," said Bridget Koza of Woodbridge. "It's never really a blind date anymore."

The blind date now has 20-20 vision to help avoid dating disasters. Love may be many things, but with the Web, blind doesn't have to be one of them.

"Technological improvements made possible another way of imagining human relationships," said Sorin Matei, an assistant professor of communications at Purdue University. "Before, dating was the product of fate, luck and the quest for romance."

Now, he said, "some would-be daters want to imagine a world where you take the fate and luck aspects out and put in some sort of rationality."

Technology has made complete anonymity a thing of the past. The Internet is the new little black book and a clearinghouse to meet and research potential dates.

Web sites including Google, online social networks such as Thefacebook.com and online background searches allow people to investigate others without having to leave the comfort of their chairs.

"At the end of the day, what matters in dating is how well people get along and whether or not they're attracted to one another," said Chris Hughes, a Harvard student and co-creator of Thefacebook, originally a tool designed at his university to digitize the old-fashioned yearbook and provide interesting facts to allow the freshman class to get to know one another.

Using the Internet to research people before talking to them or even e-mailing is becoming the norm for many teens and twentysomethings. They want to see everything from a potential date's picture to his or her credit history.

Kathleen McNerney of Cincinnati thinks it's creepy to know little details about a person before a first date.

"Our culture is always seeking control and we want to be in control of the situation," she said. "We don't want to trust someone blindly."

With more people investigating online, first-date questions are starting to change, Matei said, but asking the wrong question -- because you already know so much -- might make a person feel violated.

Lauren Smith of Indianapolis admits to using Google and Thefacebook to find out more about people. She says the big difference between the blind date of today and yesteryear is that today's first impression takes place on a computer screen.