Mashable

Social Media

Pearl.com Has Professional Advice, for a Price

2012%2f12%2f04%2f2e%2fpearlcomhas.bvb

For about the price of a tank of gas each month, you can have your own lawyer, physician and coterie of Harvard educated experts. Pearl.com (like a "pearl of wisdom") launched on Tuesday, and connects users to trained and certified experts who can answer a myriad of questions.

Sure, everyone uses Google for minor medical-related questions — but for specific and credible Q&A, Pearl.com says it is the place to visit. Pearl.com has about 10,000 experts in 700 specialties that the site's creators verify to make sure they are current and legitimate legal and medical professionals. In fact, all professionals on the site must go through an eight-step process, including background checks and a test to prove their skills. For the professionals on the site, answering questions can be a part or full time job paying as much as $40,000 per year.

Pearl.com was formerly Justanswer.com, started by Andy Kurtzig eight years ago, and had 10.5 million unique monthly visitors. But now, he tells Mashable, the site does a lot more than just answer questions, hence the name change and redesign.

"There's a lot of answer sites and ask sites and we just do a lot more than they do," he said.

There's a reason the site's focus seems to be on medical professionals. Kurtzig started the site when his wife was pregnant with their first child. She had a lot of questions, he said, and having programming experience, Kurtzig decided to create a site where she could talk to doctors.

"We have professional standing by, like doctors and lawyers and such," he said. With search engineers, "you often find 100 million search results and then you've got to figure it out."

Another plus to the new site? The average response time per question is around 7.5 minutes, he said.

The verification process for experts take a bit longer. Since all medical and legal professionals must prove they have an active license as well as pass a test, getting verified can take up to two months. Some categories are wait-listed, so professionals applying to certain medical categories will have to wait longer to be added.

Currently, the site could use more qualified appliance and tech repair specialists, Kurtzig said.

Once approved, experts login to the site and peruse questions with dollar values next to them.

For the users asking questions, each question cost $30 for non subscribers, but for subscribers, $49-$99 per month (depending on the category) grants you unlimited questions and access to the site's archive. If a user signs up for a $49 per month subscription they can ask unlimited question within a specific category. For $99, a user can ask unlimited question in any category. Customers set the price based on how much information they want and the professional they're relying on for answers (lawyers charge more than doctors, for example).

"Now they have a place to go to get real professional help whenever they need it," he said. "We make a real, tangible difference in human lives."

What do you think about Pearl.com? Will you use this site?

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, ricardoinfante

Load Comments

What's New

What's Rising

What's Hot
http://mashable.com/2012/06/19/advice-doctors-lawyers-pearl/
mashable.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-30
40978
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GKZ3JHO2M2DGWBOLAGTTTC5WLWFBZCQD
<urn:uuid:fa6775b6-0671-44d1-b320-2c6c9e3b497e>
2016-07-27T22:05:09Z
72.247.8.185
sha1:R3JEQQCO4LNVLPS2LCFVEOABEDBIXGF5
<urn:uuid:42dccf0d-5129-483f-b49c-b517eec654c2>
http://mashable.com/2012/06/19/advice-doctors-lawyers-pearl/
response
<urn:uuid:ccf0e29b-858e-48b4-a907-5f2322bed560>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-30
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf