Seth Godin recently posted about a problem he’s having with gmail and Apple mail, not something I can help him with but he raises an interesting point:

I have no doubt that this blog post will find the person insightful, smart and kind enough to tell me what to do.

Which leads to the point of the post: what if you don’t have a popular blog?

How do you find that one person in the wide wide world that has the answer to your question, whatever your question might be?

Google is amazing partly because it goes so far in helping with the haystack problem. …

But Google doesn’t help with finding experts when the problem is hard to define, or when interactivity is required.

Which I think presents an interesting business opportunity for someone. I guess in many ways blogging is supposed to solve this problem - the expert blogs about their area of expertise - and Google indexes it. The problem is you’ll only find the expert if they’ve written about your particular problem in the same way that you describe it to the search engine. What if you can’t describe it? Perhaps you don’t know the right jargon - or you’ve misunderstood the meaning of the jargon and you’re asking the wrong question.

To solve this, you’ve also got the problem of determining who is an expert, what they are an expert in and them classifying the searches query so you can match it to an area of expertise. If you can do it however I’ve no doubt that thousands of experts would pay good money to register and millions of users would use it to find experts everyday.

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