If you are interested, we are also on our way making Airbnb for individual's expertise.
http://expert.io
But it is just like the Airbnb story, start from nothing is always difficult.
Hm, this was a perfect scenario where I wished the colour of the links would be as "grayed" out as the rest of the down-modded comment. I ended up clicking it and, well, it's what you'd expect.
I don't mind the odd guy sneaking in a shameless plug here and there, but this was just a bit too forced and you just made yourself look silly. :/
[Edit; Okay, you're selling to tutors. You should make that even more blindingly obvious, and either make a separate section for people searching for tutors, or remove it altogether because the experience is crap. Are you sure adversising as free is legal? I mean you must be charging some mark up that the customer pays above what the tutor gets.]
Your first minute is useless. I go to your site and understand, okay, you're basically an online tutoring intermediary. But the services you offer are difficult to figure out, there's no categorisation or tagging, the search is bad, and you're not sure if your primary customers are the people buying or selling the service.
Basically the homepage is for experts, and this little url is for experts to get their clients.
Back to your question:
Yes, tutoring is an important part of our service, if you type "english tutor" into that search box, you will pretty much get the idea.
At this moment, english tutor is our main focus and almost every visitor come to the site is to find tutor or is a tutor. So the search form is quite useful to them.
But we don't want to offer categorization or tagging now is because that there is not so much to be categorized or tagged. I personally don't like a 3 level of categories without any real content. And we don't want to tag our site to be a tutoring platform with those categories. So we tend not to show them at the moment.
Apart from that, everything you said is true. With the exception of we are not an online tutoring intermediary.
I don't mind the odd guy sneaking in a shameless plug here and there, but this was just a bit too forced and you just made yourself look silly. :/