When Does A Search Engine Become The Yellow Pages?

I am waiting for the yellow pages to finally get that the Search Engine's are trying to become what the Yellow Pages already do. At what point does all the paid ads like at Yahoo become meaningless? A Big advertisement if you will. Because if it really is about ads, then why not just go full circle to the online Yellow Pages?

Verizon Super Pages has been implementing a pay per click system. I gotta believe the yellow pages have the headstart, if advertisements is where it is all going.

Search Engines in theory, are supposed to be about relevancy.

Type in "Real Estate Listings" and it should give you a page about/with real estate listings.

However, when you take money for ad space, relevancy dissipates as the dollar speaks louder than relevancy. Sure they try to monitor it to some degree but I think you will agree that these engines, as they move toward portals, are becoming big 'ole ads.

The next Google will be one that offers true search, then they will want to move out of their college dorm lifestyle too. So they will look for their payday and the cycle continues.

Just go back in time and look at the tombstones of engines past. Infoseek, Go, Alta Vista, etc. Good ones have even come along with arguably better search than Google. But alas, they were bought off like the Urban Legend of the 200 mile per gallon car patents that were purchased by petro companies.

AskJeeves bought DirecthitandTeoma as an example.

Google clearly is in revenue mode as their search results have gotten worse and worse over the past yr and a half. Type in "city + real estate" and you get mostly directories. Why on earth would they point people from one search medium to another-possibly competitive directory search medium?

Call me conspiratorial but you see more and more people driving prices up on the Google Adwords as the top positions in the natural results are flooded with junk. Me thinks the junky natural results are for a reason.

Smart moves by Google for sure. In the short term anyway.

But what do they care? They are about to be paid. Wall Street Style.