Search engines are in a conundrum.  With more than 40% of all small retail and contractor businesses still without Web sites, the search engines need to figure out – before theses business do all get online – how to return meaningful results.

Is it possible?  Of course it is.  Print yellow pages have been doing it for decades using simple categorical listings. But can search-based queries deliver the results intended by the user.

Here’s an example search query: “Fairfield connecticut house painters”, with the intent being to find multiple painting companies from which to get three quotes to paint a house.

Let’s start with the One-box result.

In this case I got the 10-pack, with two results for Lowes, one MerchantCircle, one wild-card-content-switching (is this the common term?) lead-selling site (paintingservicedeals.com), and six actual contractors (two without their own sites). So really I got four contractors, not bad since all I want is three quotes.

OK, let’s say that of the four, I felt comfortable enough with two to get quotes. So let’s look at the natural results.

Uh-oh. I only picked up one more painter – rightcontractors.com. I did get two craigslist and two kijiji. The rest are all lead sellers.

Really, these results are ok, but not great. I could call a Craigslist or Kijiji ad, but in light of recent news, I think I’ll stick with a company with a Web site and real address.

Are there only 5 painting contractors that will service Fairfield CT? I’ll bet there are 10 in Fairfield, and at least another 30 that service this town. So what are they going to do to get leads? And what is Google going to do to help users find these contractors?

Directories.

The question then becomes, why would I start at Google if they’re just going to push me to a directory. Soon I’m going to have a favorite directory for services.

What does this mean for Google? It probably means less AdWords money. Google will still be a great tool for finding reference material, but that’s not going to pay the bills.