Directed Edge is already looking at the world that way. I'm not claiming they're the startup that will make Google irrelevant. Historical precedents suggest it's still early for that. But it seems extremely unlikely that nothing ever will.
Microsoft dethroned IBM with "if we did PCs, [most] people wouldn't need to do mainframes".
Ditto Google to Microsoft with "if we did search & cloud, [most] people wouldn't need to do OS".
For someone to "beat" Google the the search bar needs to become irrelevant.
If the incidence of such is higher within the recommendations space, it's by less than a standard deviation.
Most people spend a large fraction of their online day in a couple of applications. Those applications could easily auto-generate useful search links - this kills the search box. It also solves some very hard search problems. ("dolphin" is ambiguous in a search box but it's unambiguous in most documents.)
The next step is to make the search results page more useful. In the context of a document, this "more useful results page" is likely to not have ads. Instead, the results will go into the document in a useful form.
FWIW, Microsoft does a better job monetizing the best candidates for this kind of search integration.
For instance, checkout some of the demos of Marti Hearst's research into faceted search at Berkeley: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/demos.html