Here at Avvo, we make every effort to make it easier for consumers everywhere to find the right doctor or lawyer. It’s with that goal in mind that we offer partnerships and syndication opportunities to everything from Boomerator, an advice network for Baby Boomers, to Topix, a hyperlocal news and information provider. We’re excited about the partnerships we’ve built, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done with the data we’ve collected on Avvo. It’s for that reason that I’m proud to introduce the Avvo API.

The Avvo API provides a way for developers to build their own sites and applications on top of the information contained on Avvo. Whether it’s showing a list of doctors who specialize in a medical condition your users are researching, to creating a map of the places in the U.S. with the best health care (as measured by Avvo Rating, of course!), you’ll be able to use the Avvo API to help you build it.

Excited to try it out? We’ve provided documentation at api.avvo.com. When you’re ready to get started, you can contact us to get access to the API. From api.avvo.com, you can get all the information and examples you need to use the API in your own apps. Write code in Ruby? We’ve built a wrapper around the API to get you up and running as quickly as possible. The code is hosted on github (where you can also see examples), and it can be installed by running:

gem install avvo_api

So browse the documentation, take a look at the examples, contact us if you need help, and build something cool!

Some days are better than others, but…

The advent of advertising on Avvo has brought up a lot of internal discussion around product goals and how they relate to revenue.  I like to think about product and revenue as a walk in the mountains.  Elevation is revenue (higher = better) and each step you take is a product change.  If you want more revenue, walk up hill.  Sound familiar?

Large companies out there… let me know if this rings a bell:

Say you run the product team for a site (retailer, directory, whatever).  You ship an initial version.  Early on you probably go through two or three major site design overhauls (could be to increase revenue or just for usability).  As your traffic and revenue scale so does your organization.  You adopt an even greater focus on conversion.  Each change that is made is A|B tested.  Poor performers are immediately backed out.  With increased revenue comes increased risk of failure – the penalty for making a mistake is much larger.  With increased penalty for failure comes increased fear to change.  You are still walking up the mountain, but you’re taking very small steps.  Eventually you reach a point where you’ve invested so much time and money iterating on a single site design and business model that you can no longer improve it.  The design has run it’s course and you’ve reach the local maximum of site performance – the top of the mountain, the summit.  Good for you.  The problem is, you don’t know if there’s a taller mountain out there and the only way to find out is to walk down hill, which no one is willing to do.  You can, of course, use your position at the top of a tall mountain to shoot at people trying to climb up your mountain or other nearby mountains, but expedition-wise, you’re kind of stuck.

This seems to happen to all the biggies.  EBay, Amazon, Expedia (sorry guys).  Their core products are more or less exactly the same as they were 6-8 years ago.  Is this because they’ve all managed to find the absolute best of all possible site designs for their respective verticals (ie: the top of Mt. Everest)?  Or is it because they’ve climbed to a point where they can’t really climb any higher without first going down hill?  Their core product can’t be improved without first being rebuilt.  They can of course grow horizontally, but they will forever be defending their hill and they will always have more to lose than the people trying to push them off.

Is this avoidable?  What’s the lesson?  Can a growing company avoid this trap?  Can an established 800 pound gorilla get themselves out of it?  Beats me.  All I know is that once a hill climb algorithm reaches a local maximum, it has a choice: it can give up and declare a solution, or it can move to a random spot and start climbing again.

You can take that to mean one of two things:

1) As an employee of a company at the summit of a mountain, you can quit and join a startup which has just started climbing.
2) As the CEO of a company stuck at a summit, you can build your own competition.  Invest in a team that tries to knock the legacy site off its pedestal.  If that sounds too risky, don’t worry too much, sooner or later someone else will do it for you.

Some of you have noticed that your Avvo Answer notifications have been missing this week.  Last week we shipped a subtle, but fairly major change to Avvo Answers.  This includes giving the consumer a chance to flag an answer as “best” as well as some other fun stuff.  We also completely reimplemented notifications…. and we broke some stuff.  Sorry about that, but it all should be fixed now (as of a few minutes ago).

Incidentally, Avvo Answers got some TV PR this week and we’re overflowing with new questions – so there are plenty to choose from!

Look for more Avvo Answers changes in the next few weeks.

For all you Avvo Answer participants our there… ever wonder how a question gets assigned to a particular practice area? Or maybe wonder why that DUI question was posted in Brain Injury?

Well, I’ll tell you.

We use what’s called a “classifier” to help the consumer pick the practice area their question belongs in. Given a block of text, the classifier returns the practice areas that most likely describe that text. To seed the classifier we mapped several thousand questions to practice areas by hand (btw, thanks for doing that Linnea :).

This classifier allows us to map questions to practice areas without human interaction and instantly. That allows us to send email notifications to participating lawyers as soon as the question is asked. That leads to quicker answers and a better experience for the consumer and the lawyer.

The classifier is pretty good, but it’s far from perfect, and we hate it when you receive a notification about a Child Custody question being posted in Car Accident as much (if not more) than you do. So, we’ve add a little feature to allow lawyers to correct the practice area for questions. If you see a question that is in the wrong practice area, fix it and we’ll use that data to make our classifier smarter which will make your question-answering experience better.

Here’s what it looks like (note that you have to be logged in as a lawyer to see this feature):

And then the form…

A while ago I posted on the growing success and importance of Q&A sites on the web and their affect on user search behavior. Here are some numbers I pulled from compete.com to support my theory.

wiki.answers.com shows 148% growth YOY.
answers.yahoo.com shows 42% growth YOY.

Now, you may once again ask yourself…

Why do I, a highly experienced attorney, care about Q&A sites?

Let’s get to it…

1) People who answer these questions are forever tied to the content.

Whether it be on Avvo Answers or some other Q&A site, if you provide a quality answer to “How much does a DUI cost?”, your answer (and more importantly, your professional presence) will live on with the question. As I mentioned in my previous post, the traffic to Q&A pages is, generally speaking, highly targeted – meaning people who search for “how much does a DUI cost” are very likely to need a DUI lawyer in the future, and if they encounter said question on a site where your answer is the best, they are more likely to contact you.

Ideally, you can provide this content on a site that recognizes your position as a legal professional so consumers understand you are knowledgeable and you are open for business (again, a site like Avvo).

2) It’s easier than blogging and more consumer-focused… (though you should also blog)

Blogging requires a level of creativity not everyone possesses. It’s also very time consuming. Answering questions is much more focused and specific, and it doesn’t require you to be inspired to write. In addition, a legal blogger’s audience is typically other legal professionals, an approach that, depending on practice area, may not be that effective in snagging new clients. In contrast, answers to consumer questions are by definition consumer focused – you’re actually interacting with prospective clients.

3) Answering questions is one of the most effective ways to improve your consumer-facing online presence, period.

It varies from site to site, but generally each answerer is marked with a link to his or her “profile” on that site where you can usually include a link to your site or a phone number or email address (this is certainly the case for Avvo). First rule of online marketing: more links = more traffic = more prospective clients = more $$$. (That is also the second and third rules).

If you compare Q&A results, in terms of link building, to the effort required to build a blog/twitter network, it’s pretty compelling. Each answer is a link whereas you can blog all day and no one will see it unless you convince other people to link to you.

4) It’s free (other than your time).

If you are a solo or small firm, honestly, you can’t afford not to do this. The cost of traditional marketing is astronomical. Even SEM (Search Engine Marketing; i.e, buying web traffic) in the legal space is highly competitive and expensive.

Let’s consider the prior example. How much are you currently spending to get your name in front of 100 people that probably need a DUI lawyer? Spending 20 minutes answering a handful of DUI related questions will likely get your answer, your name, and your smiling face 100 pages views over the following months. Rinse and repeat and you could get your presence out to literally thousands of people a week… for free.

Granted, answering questions online is not for everyone. It does take time, which not everyone has. You might be the type that doesn’t like to get their hands dirty in the marketing space. You may have enough cash to hire a marketing team. You might hate computers. Or you might be in a position where you have more work than you need and aren’t interested in more. Good for you. But for the small firm, the solo, or the lawyer fresh out of law school looking to make a name for his or herself, it is an excellent, effective, cheap way to build online presence and interact with prospective clients.

Last Call, our blood-alcohol estimator, has been getting some great press lately thanks to New York Times technology reporter, John Quain. First, John included Last Call in his round-up of great driving-related iPhone apps. See the article “Have Smartphone, Can Travel” which you can also find in the March 8th hard-copy edition of the Sunday NYT.

Then, John went on to highlight Last Call on CBS’s “Up to the Minute.” The segment is very similar to his NYT article, but it is much richer due to the visuals of John demoing the various products, including Last Call. For the attorneys billing by the hour out there, Last Call shows up at 3:27. :-)

Thank you John for spreading the word about Last Call!

Mark

Maybe not, but they are certainly making the problem easier. The basic premise – at some point, someone has posed the same question as you, posted it on the internet, and someone else has answered it. So, why not just google for your question?

The concept of natural language search has been around for a while. A perfect natural search engine would allow you to ask a question as if you were speaking to a human. Ambiguous words (such as the notorious “apple”) would be resolved by their context in the question. It’s difficult problem to solve well. There are many sites out there that have attacked it, Ask.com for one. Few are household names as a result.

Over the last decade, my consumer search techniques have evolved along with search technology. Typically, I envision the document I’m trying find (hoping it exists), boil it down to a few keywords, and try entering different permutations into Google. Lately however, I find myself skipping the first few steps and just typing a natural language question into the search box. Crazy, I know, but it’s actually becoming more and more effective and it’s not because Google released some new natural language tech (though they may have and I’m just not aware of it).

Q&A sites are popping up everywhere and their content and traffic are growing rapidly. These Q&A sites often function in one particular vertical (Avvo Answers) but the big boys are attempting to win across many categories, like Yahoo Answers. They allow users to post questions publicly and other users answer them publicly (usually for some kind of ego-boo, “points”, or just for fun). The result is a very concise page around one very specific topic (in effect, search bot candy.). The H1 is the question, the page title is the question, the meta description is the question, the details are loaded with keywords and all in the first 100 words of the page. If someone else ever searches for this specific question again (or some variation), this page is sure to be in the top 10. Now, repeat that process 10 million times or 100 million times. Toss even the weakest search engine relevancy on top (Google is more than sufficient) and you’ve got pretty good natural language search simply by the Law of Large Numbers.

It’s important to note that these are “long tail” pages, meaning that generally speaking, no one page receives at ton of traffic, but in aggregate, a site can generate a ton of highly targeted traffic. The level of targeting is also important to note. We recently received a visitor who came from Google with this query, what are the consequences of being charged with a battery?. There’s a pretty good chance that this person will be looking for a criminal defense lawyer in the near future.

So, where will this all take us? Let’s say we have a few hundred million answered questions floating around the web, indexed by search engines. “How will that change my business?”, you may ask.

Two ways:

1. My guess is that we will start to see this change user search behavior. People will slowly start to move to natural language searches as opposed to keywords searches because, well, it’s easier. It takes less brain effort to blindly enter a question than to identify keywords. And it’s becoming more and more effective as the collective content grows.
2. Users will become accustomed to Q&A sites turning up in their search results. Consequently overall importance (accumulatively) and popularity of Q&A sites will grow. Like most of the web, it’s a feedback loop.

Now, this whole transition won’t happen with a bang. There won’t be a revolution of natural search; it will happen slowly and quietly as users are retrained on searching the web.

“So what?”, you are thinking. “I’m a lawyer. What do I care about natural language search or Q&A sites?” Time to put your marketing hat on, but I’ll leave that for a future post. Here are a few examples to get the juices flowing.

What are the penalties of a car accident without insurance?
When can i remove spouse from my health coverage?
What are my responsibilities as trustee of my fathers estate?

PS: Granted, natural search will continue to be an important problem to crack. For instance, temporal questions like “Who beat the Lakers yesterday?” and “What will the weather be like tomorrow?” are especially tricky and are not well served by the brute-force approach. Static pages won’t suffice for questions like these; a true solution is required. But there is a huge subset of natural language questions that can be well answered by the content in Q&A sites.

Avvo Board Member Brad Silverberg forwarded me this post today, and it is certainly interesting. SEO – specifically Google SEO – is turning the search/content industry on its head these days, and Alex Bosworth even argues that it is destroying the web. He says:

Today, everyone searches on Google. This means that you ought to be spending a lot of time thinking specifically about how to be placed highly and broadly on Google, if you would like Google to send millions of people to your site.

Unfortunately this means you need to do Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the worst thing ever invented. It’s destroying good web application development. Here’s why:

Alex forgot to mention that Google is also destroying the Yellow Pages . . .

It’s a digital age, my friends. And, yes, Google currently owns it. You can rage against the machine, but ultimately if you do not understand and optimize for it, you will let your revenue do the walking.

Mark

Many of you have noticed how the Client Review portion of our site seems slightly disconnected (you can’t sort by client ratings, you can’t filter to lawyers that have client reviews, etc