George Frew tries to find true love via the Internet in the Oxford Mail's continuing Love Week series. So how far do you have to travel along the Information Super Highway before you reach Lonely Hearts Lane, or the signpost that says , 'Street of Love'? Is it just a case of clicking on and doing a little light surfing before discovering Miss Right - or are you more likely to end up on the boulevard of broken dreams in a St Valentine Day's massacre of romantic hopes?

To put it another way, how easy is it to score a bullseye with Cupid's electronic arrow on the Internet? People have been using the Net to look for partners for years, but computer nerds and anoraks aside, how many folk know what exactly is involved?

Well, to start with, you need a catchy handle, a name that stands out from the crowd of cyberspace loveseekers. After some discussion with Oxford Mail Systems Development Manager Steve King, it was decided that my new name for Internet love-seeking purposes would be Sacha Le Saux.

Steve and his colleague, Systems Support Specialist Paul Willis are two of the Mail's resident computer wizards. For these lads, it's a case of (electronic) chips with everything. They helped me get set up to surf, to become another fly on the world-wide web.

And it really is world-wide.

Once registered for my free go on one on-line dating site, I could have tried my luck with some Albanian totty, for instance.

I didn't fancy it, though. I've seen these people on the news. They all seem to carry automatic weapons, shout a lot and have duelling scars and moustaches. And that's just the women.

Brunei-Darussalam seemed a bit far to go for a Valentine Day's drink and as for meeting up with a date in Burkina-Faso, well, you'd need to be Burkina mad, wouldn't you?

So I decided to confine myself closer to home and clicked on to 'Oxford'. Guess what? No-one was at home. There was not one single name on the site I logged on to.

I found another electronic dating haven and began filling in the required form. Tick as appropriate. Was I a man looking for a woman? Well, actually, I was a journalist looking for a story, but yes, for my purposes, that would do.

I certainly wasn't a man looking for a man. Did I smoke? Drink? What was I looking for, exactly, and with what sort of woman? What did people tend to notice about me first? What was my spirituality? (Bells, usually...) What sort of music did I like? And so on - the usual sort of stuff, culminating with What else About Myself Would I like To Tell The World?

Never mind me - what were my prospective dates prepared to divulge about themselves?

One described herself as looking for a 'Tall Solvent male', which to me made her seem like a gold-digger. There's more than one sort of 'solvent' abuse, I reflected, as I moved my mouse and clicked forward into the night.

And if I'd thought that my chosen monicker of Sacha Le Saux was a bit exotic, it was tame compared to some. Imagine dreaming up a name like 'Ribena', for instance. Or 'Richie Rich'. Or 'Silver Mercedes Benz'. Some names sounded too good to be true - especially when you read the descriptions that went with them. 'Chantelle', for example, described herself as a '19-year old, curvy, blue-eyed blonde.' Hmm. This made me think that 'she' was more likely to be a 'he' and that 19-year old Chantelle was probably 53-year old Bert, balding, toothless and perverted. But perhaps that was just my sceptical mind. Some of the messages appeared confusing, until you examined them more closely. One woman specified that she wanted someone who must be "Tall, medium large build like my children." While I was pondering what this family of giants must be like, I noticed that there was, in fact, the word 'and' between 'build' and 'like'. Another person called Lorraine revealed that she had "Long dark hair and eyes".

Someone else was desperately seeking "Rob The Hairdresser."

In the box where visitors to the site were asked to describe their physical appearance, one honest soul had written, "People tend to hear me before they see me..."

But there is no doubt - people do find love on the Net. Sue Jeffries of Eynsham did. Sue, 35, surfed the Net on a whim one night at work. "I was fed up kissing frogs who turned into toads instead of princes," she smiled.

"There are always more men looking for women than the other way round, and within an hour, I'd had ten replies."

"My nickname was 'Wishful', but you should always choose letters near the front of the alphabet, because the lists come up in alphabetical order."

Sue's lucky number came up when a bloke calling himself Bart Simpson got in touch. His real name was Gary Cook and they arranged to get in touch by phone, before he came to visit her in Eynsham. "I was as nervous as hell before we met," admitted Sue. "I kept thinking 'what have I done?' and that people would think I was a sad muppet. At the time, I still thought finding a partner on the Net was a geeky thing to do."

But happily, Sue and Gary clicked like the mouse of a nimble-fingered Mac magician.

They're getting married in June. "I'd recommend the Internet, - we have no plans for a virtual wedding, though," smiled Sue.

As for Sacha Le Saux, well, his details are still out there somewhere. He haunts the Information Super Highway, lost somewhere between Cupid Crescent and the Road of Romance.

If you see him, say hello...

Story date: Thursday 11 February

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.