Searches are one of the most important tools at your disposal on POZ Personals. Instead of waiting for users to reach out to you, you can design your own search to find your perfect match. In this blog post, we’ll share some helpful tips on how to customize your search to best work for you.

There are two types of searches on POZ Personals. The first is the Quick Search. Quick searches are a good way to find a large group of users by category, including gender, state, sexual preference and age range. If you are looking for a search to return a wide range of users, quick searches are the way to go.

Although there are many POZ Personals users across the United States and the world, certain areas will return more active users than others. For example, you will find more users in San Francisco than in Omaha. For a more detailed breakdown on POZ Personal demographics, check out this recent blog post.

Once you get your search results, you’ll have a wide range of sorting options to choose from. The first set of results will always be premium members who meet your criteria. These are followed by all other members. The default sort option is distance. You can also sort by age, last log-in, with photo or without, and more.

Once your results are set up just the way you want, you can choose how to engage with the members you like. You can click on a member’s photo to see his or her full profile, for example. You can also add them to your hot list, send a flirt or send a message right from the search results page.

The second type of search is the Advanced Search. This option lets you drill down into some specific musts and must nots. But be careful: If you get too picky, your search results may turn up empty. On the Advanced Search page, you can search by status, including kids, tattoo, religion and more. What about politics? You’ll find this in the Advanced Search. Bear in mind, the members returned in these searches have to meet ALL your criteria. The more you “require” of a date, the more likely you are to get zero profiles returned in the search results. As most of us know, rare is the date that is “perfect.”

For our gay users, we’ve just added the option to indicate your preferred sexual position. You can search for tops or bottoms or versatile partners. Because this is a new feature only about 10 percent of our gay members have added this information to their profile as of this blog posting. Keep this in mind when including it in a search, as it will limit your results.

To recap, if you’re not getting as many profiles returned in your searches as you’d like, try broadening your search by dropping some of the criteria you’re using. If you’re getting too many profiles when you run a search, try to be more specific by adding some more criteria.

Thank you for being a POZ Personals member. If you have any suggestions on how we can make POZ Personals better, please write to us at personals@poz.com.