Every day, people looking for love log in to their accounts on Yahoo Personals, Match.com, eHarmony, Date.com, or another representative of other such sites hoping to find an e-mail from some stranger who they hope will become their true soulmate.

Unfortunately, rarely does that happen. Very likely, contact with an online stranger will lead to nothing but a big letdown. Such is the reality in the relatively new phenomenon of online dating.

The concept of seeking a mate online harks back to the mid-90's, when the Internet was in its nascent form in terms of widespread consumer use. Among the pioneers was Match.com, which started business on April 21, 1995. The enterprise is now a massive conglomerate, sporting about one million paying subscribers from fully 246 countries. By some accounts more than 60,000 new people across six continents join up on the site every day, joining the 15 million people already there. The parent company now operates 30 dating sites in 18 local languages.

While Match.com is one of the preeminent dating sites, others have experienced similar massive growth in user participation and subscribership. There seems to be no lack in the number of people who are willing to put their life's details online for anyone with an Internet connection to view.

But, is this development a healthy one? Does online dating represent a forward step in male-female communication? Many experienced users of such sites have good reasons to respond in the negative, positing that the cons far outweigh the pros.

It is the endemic lying that is at the core of most complaints. You simply can't put much credence in what you see and read in a given dating profile because it is far too easy for a person to untruthfully present himself or herself.

Cheating to gain an advantage, especially when seeking a mate, is probably as old as humanity itself. On dating sites, it has been definitively demonstrated that by falsely placing a picture of a better-looking person in a profile, and/or by dramatically overstating the stated income, an online dater can exponentially increase the number of daily responses that he or she receives.

So, the travesty continues and Web-based dating sites march on. Despite huge problems as a communication medium, literally hundreds of thousands of people around the globe are signing up each and every day. It seems that as long as the Internet exists, people seeking to find love will frequent it, hoping to find that magic hookup.