Two success stories:
1. a former colleague and good friend met her husband online (match.com). They are happily married, 10+ years.
2. Me. Met my wife via eharmony. All that nonsense in the commercials about "find the love of your life, soul mate" etc. -- it turned out to be the case for us. We got introduced through that site, wrote to each other, phoned, met for coffee,and when I walked away from that first meeting I knew I wanted to marry her. Lucky for me, she had the same interest. We are now married, and ideally happy. We lived about an hour apart. We had similar interests and had perhaps been in some of the same places or at the same events at the same time, but if we had not invested ourselves in the time and money of that site, we never would have met.
It is all a crapshoot, however you search. Might as well be systematic, and use all the resources out there. The same mix of nice, awful, attractive, not attractive exists pretty much everywhere, and however you meet, it still is up to your judgment to figure out if you want to see that person again.