Berkeley Dates

Berkeley Dates is a dating site that is directed towards the students, faculty and alumni of the University of California – Berkeley. The site looks really nice and has a slick, professional tour. Signing up for your free membership is a very quick and easy process. While your profile in the site can be very detailed they let you skip most of the details at sign up and let you finish it later. Once inside the site there is a simple to use menu bar that lets you navigate the site.

Since this site is focused in the Berkeley area a search for people in my area returned zero matches. Overall there are about 225 women and about 450 men registered on the site. By most standards that is a very small amount of users, but since this site is focused in one area those that are in that area do have a nice selection of people to choose from. However, those like me who live outside the Berkeley area will have little use for the site.

The site has some nice search options. You can do a basic search which lets you sort the profiles by age range and distance from you. The Super Search option uses the details from your profile to better match you with someone. Unfortunately, those are the only two features on this site. There are no chat rooms or instant message options. You can just search profiles and look at people's profiles. Luckily, you can do that for free since you only have to get a paid membership if you want to contact someone directly. This allows you to really test out the site before committing to it.

In the end I scored this site on the low end due to its lack of extra features, small number of members and location specific audience. However, if you do live in that area or are affiliated with the university then the site will be of much higher value to you and is probably worth checking out.