Years ago your little Real Estate Agency put up a web site and you began to notice that visitors were coming from sites with strange names like Yahoo and Alta Vista. Later you got hip to how things worked and gave your sisters' son a few bucks to 'optimize your site' while he was home from College on summer break. Next they offered to put you right on the front page for any term you wanted, if you'd just give them $0.05 each time someone clicked - sounded like a good deal. And today you spend hundreds of thousands (no longer at $0.05 per click) and have a team of 5 who write copy and work on organic optimization.

One small problem. Your relationship with the search engines isn't what you think. They're not trying to organize the world's information and help people route to the most relevant stuff. Despite what they say. They're trying to own it all. One step at a time.

So one day you wake up and find out that they've built a Real Estate page. More focused and will help bring in more views for your paid ads they tell you. But week by week you watch more and more services inhabit the page until you get the idea that maybe nobody needs to visit your site anymore.

-- Now change 'Real Estate' to the name of your vertical market, and re-read those three paragraphs. Welcome to your future. I'm not saying they don't have the right to do it, and I doubt most industries or advertisers are going to stop subsidizing them on their way. But it might be time to think long and hard about a backup plan.

Oh ya. Yahoo improved their Real Estate section today. (comments here and here and here.) Google did Finance recently. Watch for Travel and many more.