First you have to decide what it is you're looking for, certain chat sites have a great quality in one aspect, but completely awful in another. It's best to find an all round great set of chat rooms that covers all the important bases. Just check the directory of chat sites listed on our site, we've done a great job finding all the best sites and categorizing and ranking them best on what's most important when using online live chat rooms.
Don't just think that whatever comes up first in Google has to be the best site, that would be great if it were the case but it almost never is. That is determined based on age, traffic and other metrics that have absolutely no relevance to the quality of a chat room whatsoever. In fact in some cases, chat rooms that rank higher in Google can actually deliver a far worst chat experience that mid ranking sites. The sites that do rank higher in Google do tend to have more people, but with that comes a price. The high ranking chat sites also have a huge amount of spam, only the best sites have a handle on this and block the majority of spam.
So here's a list of a few things to take into consideration when looking for a new chat home:
There's no point searching for online chat rooms to use that you can't access at your convenience. A lot of popular free chat room websites have yet to get with the times and offer chatting compatible with all devices. So where you could've had a great chat on your desktop on the weekend at home, you'll find you can't enjoy the same service at your lunch break in work or school because it's not smart phone compatible! Even if you are using a chat site that offers mobile chat, it might not be mixed in with the regular chat room of desktop users, it could be in a completely separate and isolated environment disabling you from being able to interact with the regular people you may've come to know.
It can really pay dividends to just scroll to the bottom of the intended site and look at the legal document, don't worry you don't have to read through the entire thing, just check that they exist. This will tell you immediately whether this is a serious website ran by professionals or a larger company, or just someones side project that might not even exist tomorrow. In this day and age with how the laws frequently change, any high quality site will have several pages of legal documentation, not just a term of use and privacy policy, but other various docs that are essential to running a successful site with longevity. The legal document pages should also be several pages long and cover all aspects.
A lot of the chat rooms websites will have a selection of live chat rooms to choose from differentiating based on topic, gender, sexuality etc. The way that chat rooms are in this day and age, and with the legalities of them and what most chatters are searching for, it's typical that most sites will have an adult orientated selection of rooms. If the site you're using has teen chat rooms, be very cautious, you're putting yourself at risk chatting in an environment with younger people. If the website has a kids chat (yes one of the biggest sites in the world actually still provides this) then click out and never go back, this is a huge risk to your safety. The way the internet used to work is that everyone would have a personally identifiable address called an "IP" address. Only the moderators and above could see this, but it would identify you as an individual. In this day and age, vast mobile data networks make it so that several hundred or even thousand people could have the same IP address. So if a chatter that's in your area has the same or similar IP address as you, and is talking appropriately with a minor, you just might have an FBI agent knocking on your door seizing your computer or showing up at your place of work/school. This happens a lot, trust me, the dangers are real.
Do some investigating of your own, google the websites name, read reviews, see what people are saying, also YouTube the website name to find out more information.
Primarily what makes a good chat room is whatever satisfies you, what the individuals standards are and what they're willing to put up with.