[symonda]

This is a good point. The problem is that it is very hard to make a living serving high-quality results which is likely why ad-funded search still dominates. The vast majority of the world will likely never want to pay for search on its own.

There are, of course, a few relatively successful paid general purpose search engines but these serve a niche demographic if you consider the world-wide scale of google et al. Possibly specialized search (we build one) will be able to thrive in the future, but these engines also serve niche markets in the end.

Thus, the real competition to ad-based search is not high quality search and that is likely why search results don't get better.