It seems like there's a battle of words raging between the major search engines about their search services. Everyone seems to be 'upgrading' their spiders or algos or bots to bring back better and better results. But as much as we hear about that, one has to wonder if it's more than lip service being paid to user demands for improved relevance in online search.

Open Question: Do pay per click search engines have an inherent incentive to have imperfect algorithmic results as a means to boost click throughs to their paid listings? I mean, think about it: if every search returned a 'perfect' set of 10 or 20 algorithmic results, what reason would any user have to click on the revenue-driving paid listings that also appear on a search results page?

In a pay-per-click world, maybe the perfect set of results is the one that provides enough relevant results to keep users coming back for their next search, but not so many that users have no reason to click on the paid results to really find what they're after.

For the big search engines, perfectly relevant 'free' results might simply hurt the bottom line. Do they really want to be better, or do they just want to sound like they're trying to be better.