I'd go further and say, if this could provably generate ad based revenue from a non-trivial number of users, Google would build the same thing and include it in

I'd go further and say, if this could provably generate ad based revenue from a non-trivial number of users, Google would build the same thing and include it in the basic search result shown in the article (with adwords suggestions) for effectively zero cost to Google. So, even if it were financially successful, it wouldn't likely survive the competition.