On-line Dating: Guide to Love or Gateway to Disaster?

It is impossible these days to watch tv without seeing one of those commercials for an on-line dating site whether it be E-Harmony.com or Match.com, we see them every day. All of these commercials claim that they can help you "find that person who's been waiting their whole life to meet you" or something equally appalling and false. I happen to have a personal, and incredibly embarrassing, tale in respect to online dating. Yes, it's true... I fell victim to the call of the ultimate anonymous relationship. It does seem appealing in some senses. There's no pressure to meet anyone if you don't like what you read and it's certainly easy to feel like you've learned so much about a person just by reading their on-line profile.
I joined Match about four years ago as a freshman in college. It was rough time for me since I went to a performing arts school and pretty much every single guy that went there was gay. Eventually I was craving a male companion, and for some reason I thought joining an on-line dating site would be a good idea. Keep in mind, this was before it was a widely publicized form of dating. Which makes me appear even more the idiot. Anyways, after doing the whole describing my entire personality in 1000 words or less deal, I started to get some responses to my profile, most of which were 40 year old men looking to be my 'daddy'. However, I did find a few people that seemed interesting and I even met one guy that went to a school very near to mine. Now here's the problem with on-line relationships, even more so than "real" relationships: There's no real way to tell when you're being lied to. My mistake? Believing that this kid had cystic fibrosis and was going to die before he was 40 and he really just wanted to show me the cool computer the Make-A-Wish Foundation gave him. You can probably figure out the rest of the story, but I'll tell you this much, the kid definitely did not have any fatal disease. Although by the time I was done telling him off, he was possibly fearing for his life.
My point to this story is that web-sites that claim they can match your personality perfectly based on asking you a million pointless questions such as "Are you outgoing or introverted? Do you like to laugh? What do you look for in a partner?" seems completely ludicrous to me. My favorite part of the Match.com website is the question and answer link. Take a look, it's pretty entertaining the way they try to validate their site.
On a slightly less cynical note, I have actually witnessed some success stories in relation to on-line dating. My aunt met her husband through a dating site for people in her religion and my cousin met her husband through a site for singles with kids. So I suppose it can work for some people, but my advice would be to proceed with caution. A LOT of caution.