With pay per click prices generally trending downward, and competition going up, Google has to focus on actually making money - not a huge surprise there. The b

With pay per click prices generally trending downward, and competition going up, Google has to focus on actually making money - not a huge surprise there. The bigger problem for them, I think is that their ad business is still heavily trained on search intent, and search behavior. Certainly, google understands search behavior better than any other company, but as an end user, I find that my web behavior now is far less predicated on the functionality of search than it once was. With search, I show intent, frequently looking to purchase something. However, as google's results have become worse and worse at surfacing useful information for me, I increasingly rely on my bookmarks, or other favorite places to start. Because the search is not getting better at the same rate that the internet is getting bigger, I find I don't bother with extensive search-based shopping, and instead hit standard review sites or shopping sites. This wouldn't be such a problem if I still got to _those_ sites through advertising, or search, but I don't do that much at all. IMO, google really needs to change their tactics with search in order to put themselves back into the purchase intent stream a bit more.