Why Search Isn't Perfect - Yet & Finding a Lawyer On-line.

Finding lawyers on the web can be a problem. Of course we have the Rominger Legal Attorney Directory, and it works for the states where we have volunteers, but putting shameless plugs aside, with all the web sites out there, you would think it would be easy. Think again.

Try it. Type in personal injury attorney in google (or click the link). The results are mainly a clump of directory sites. Most of them have links, and some even lead to practitioners in the geographical area you are looking for. Try revamping the search to get local, and you get most of the same directories. It almost seems that the name of a law firm is required to find a law firm site, and if you know their name, you might already know their number.

Anyhow, the point of this all is that even Google is not the perfect way to find counsel. So far it is just the perfect way to start a search for counsel. But I think this will change soon.

You don't think that Google Analytics is free just because a large corporation wants to do no evil, do you? Do you know what Google Analytics is? It is a repackaged version of Urchin, which is a powerful web tracking software that allows web site owners to follow the flow of a visitor through their web site. A web master can literally follow a web user, or more importantly, statistically significant groups of them, as they navigate a web site. We can watch where they go and how they get there, so to speak. We can find entries, exits & destinations, and feed this information back into our web designs.

Now if you could do that across hundreds of thousands of web sites, and follow people from your [Google's] search results, to where they ultimately navigate, you can ultimately feed this data back to improve the search results. That is to say that if most users leave Google to go to something.com for the search word "sprocket" and then navigate from something.com to widget.com, why not send them to widget.com in the first instance, and skip the middleman? The user says, gee just what I was looking for!

So, bringing it back to attorneys, once Google has assimilated the clickstream, Google will "know" that when I type Harrisburg Criminal Defense Attorney, I don't want lawyers.com, findlaw.com, or hg.org, but rather an actual attorney. That is the end all of knowing the clickstream. Once a search engine can anticipate your destination, and deposit you their without the 10 clicks in between, search will have arrived.