That might be an apt description of 3rd tier clickbait 'yellowpages' sites. But the more prominent ones spend large sums of money buying and aggregating data feeds.
Also check out the Angeles Crest highway (just North of Los Angeles), or 'The Dragon' out in the South East. You can trace the roads by the yellow dots.
The distributed search model that YaCy uses would never work in a large scale enterprise. Security, safe harbor, etc are all difficult enough using a traditional, centralized approach. Trying to imagine this done in a distributed way across the enterprise is giving me a headache.
And the closest thing to open source, turnkey search is gluing together Apache SOLR and a web crawler. Lucid Imagination offers this (plus other features) as a commercial product, but it not open source to the best of my knowledge.
The law doesn't single out Amazon, the $200 million is from all internet retailers that have any sort of presence in California. The core of the new law was defining residents participating in affiliate programs as a physical presence. Assuming nearly all retailers have some sort of affiliate program with a CA resident, the $200 million figure is how much uncollected tax revenue is available across all online retailers.
This sounds like a creative way of scamming a pay-per-call advertiser. But, I can't imagine any of the 'big boys' in the pay-per-call market risking something like this.