Michael Martinez - 10:25 pm on Sep 18, 2000 (gmt 0)

PPC search engines are only great for the surfer if the surfer is looking for something to buy. A small fraction of Web content consists of commercial sites. The majority of content sites are non-commercial operations which cannot afford to compete on PPC services with the web-info portals that suck up keywords. These guys are adding an extra step to non-commercial surfing results by inserting themselves as middle men who hope to sell something to the people who weren't searching for something to buy in the first place, or who hope to generate enough traffic to make money from ads.