There was an interesting article in the NY Times this past Sunday (article here, June 24th) which discussed the rise of “human powered” search results. The article discusses Mahalo, a new search engine which aims to provide search results edited by humans (http://www.mahalo.com/), as well as Google’s efforts to supplement its search results with human reviewed content (http://www.google.com/).

The problem with automated results is certainly demonstrated well with any search for a professional advisor such as a lawyer. When someone searches for a lawyer on Google, their perception of Google’s results will usually be that the top-ranked lawyers in a Google search are, in fact, good lawyers: i.e. Google users tend to “trust” Google and to give the results credibility. However, this is a demonstration of what I like to refer to as the “Google Gap” on professionals. Generally, Google’s results for professional searches are unrelated to any assessment of the professionals who are listed: they may or may not be lawyers at the top of the field. In fact, the results simply reflect SEO prowess or, more likely, willingness to spend money on SEO.

However, most searchers will not think about this: they will simply call one of the lawyers who appear at or near the top of Google’s results, be they organic or PPC. Of course, this poses good opportunities for lawyers who are willing to engage in SEO.

Eventually, services such as Mahalo may be able to capitalize on the gap and build better search results for professionals. Of course, this alternative strategy presents its own problems: how do you rank the results if you are doing an objective assessment. At the moment, Mahalo doesn’t seem to have any search results pages written for professional searches. For an idea about how you might do this, see the upstart search site AVVO: www.avvo.com . However, AVVO has already been sued by a number of lawyers despite having only launched a couple of weeks ago: no doubt it is a dangerous enterprise listing and ranking professionals … doing so for lawyers invites litigation, particularly in the U.S. market.