The six-month trend caught Mark Britton’s eye: huge numbers of visitors to his online legal advice site wanted key information to build a business.

The entrepreneurial spirit seems to be growing out there, and those with the bug want help finding the proper steps to success.

That’s what Britton’s Seattle-based Avvo learned as it morphed into a data mine for trends in the legal and medical industry, Britton says. In particular, over the past six months, he says staff keyed on users looking for answers about basic entrepreneurial questions. Across the site, terms like “incorporating a company” and “limited liability companies” were up 400 percent and 600 percent, respectively.

The regional breakdown showed users were looking for startup legal advice in some of the traditional entrepreneurial centers. Researchers found that in Silicon Valley page views were up 3,000 percent with visitors seeking startup-related terms, including “nondisclosure agreement,” “intellectual property,” and “incorporation.” Austin was up over 800 percent, and New York 78 percent.

“All of those terms were bubbling up at a rate we hadn’t really seen before,” says Britton.

So what does it mean? Britton’s not sure yet. It speaks to a “tremendous” amount of interest in entrepreneurship. “I do think we’re seeing a lot of those sparks,” he says, but whether that turns into profit is hard to predict.

Britton, who is a lawyer, began his online service in February 2007. While teaching finance in Italy, he came upon the idea of merging the legal with the financial after answering frequent emails from friends seeking legal advice.

Avvo provides a ratings system for lawyers and doctors and allows users to post legal or medical questions. The site boasts a 97 percent response rate, there’s 165,000 contacts each month with professionals and more than 100,000 lawyers have signed-up.

Avvo was based on the philosophy of Expedia, which Britton advised on its initial public offering in 1999. He later moved to the business side of the company before beginning Avvo. Like Expedia, the site seeks to simplify and synthesize information that is easily available on the Internet, but not necessarily very easy to understand.

Because, while finding a cheap vacation is important, picking the right doctor or lawyer is much more so, he says. “I just thought 'This is crazy, consumers really need help making these galactic life decisions.'”