I'm finally reading John Battelle's The Search, and I just got to the part that describes the state of search before Bill Gross's epiphany about contextual advertising.
Search became a problem of sorts: executives knew that when someone searched the Web, chances were he'd leave the portal if he found something that matched his intent. Hence, it wasn't in the portals' interest to improve search results. Sites that had built their audience and traffic on search—AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, Netscape—shifted strategy and began to act like media properties jealous of their audience.
Which reminded me of this great headline on TechDirt awhile back: Newspapers Should Ask Google If Linking To Other Sites Is A Good Business. From that post:
And while some may see links as offering free publicity to another site, it's should be viewed as a way of making the originating site that much more useful to readers.
In other words, if people leave your site happy, they're more likely to come back than if they leave it frustrated. Satisfied out-clicks = return visitors. And it's not like the people reading your article don't know that other sources of information exist online, not to mention how to easily locate them. The gig's up, folks.