leadegroot - 1:58 am on Jan 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

Nielsen:

This is great news for search engines: they can double their income by doing nothing.

Its important to bear in mind that the search engines do not do nothing, there is a huge amount of work happening at the SEs to improve their algorithms to attempt to show better results than the competition, because fortunately there is competition.
(sidenote: I can only say thank god for MS, which I thought I would never say, for pulling up their socks in the game so we have no risk of a monopoly and don't even suffer under a duopoly)
The success of PPC on the SEs is dependant on the quality of the organic results - if the organic results slowly degrade, users will overtime jump to the competition, and not see the paid ads.
Really, I think the answer remains not surprising: long term success of a website remains in organic SERPs, and sites which return results so brief that they can be reproduced in a snippet should have a better long term plan.