[techbio]

Yellowpages and similar services proliferated about 10 years ago as way to capture passive AdSense revenue, but with many using outdated, incomplete, and often incorrect results. Those thousands of sites are now rendered unnecessary by Google's top box, street view, maps, menus, busy times, and other integrations. There is a clear path by which Google has arguably better served both search and advertising customers, at the expense of the publisher cost center, in this domain.

[jjeaff]

And someone else could better serve Google's customers by scraping their search results and infopanels and serving up the content without any ads or tracking.

Also, a company could better serve cable customers by recording all their content and stream it to customers charging a low monthly fee.

Neither of these are much different from Google's practices in regards to their info panels.

[falcor84]

>And someone else could better serve Google's customers by scraping their search results and infopanels and serving up the content without any ads or tracking.

Unlike your second example, this example doesn't make any sense to me. The amount of effort and infrastructure required to do a decent job at this would surely make it at least as expensive as the way Google does it. How could this be cost-effective without ads? I imagine that the amount of people who'd be willing to pay for the same search results that they could get from Google is in the low single digits.

[tomglynch]

Why not do it live? Then it would be much more cost effective.

[freeone3000]

It'd be cheaper, but you can't really make up for a loss on every sale by selling in volume.