Yesterday, Trulia announced it was replacing Classified Ventures’ HomeFinder.com as the real estate search provider on WashingtonPost.com. Today, the paper seems to have reaffirmed its ties to CV via a new deal with CV’s HomeGain.

The deal with HomeGain provides paid leads to real estate agents, and on paper, complements the deal with Trulia, which is officially limited to real estate search (but could actually go in many directions, given Trulia’s wide capabilities).

HomeGain, which was started by TurnHere’s Brad Inman and sold to CV in 2005, certainly has a different model from Trulia (and HomeFinder and Zillow). While those are ad-supported services that aggregate listings from broker feeds and Web crawling, HomeGain sells leads to agents. Consumers who are looking for homes are provided with information to compare several agents.

If chosen, the agents, who pay between 55 cents and $2 per use, provide listings from their Multiple Listing Services and Internet Data Exchange subscriptions. These are theoretically more up to date and thorough than broker and crawled listings. But obviously, they don’t provide immediate gratification.

HomeGain GM Louis Cammarosano told us the new deal with The Post represents a different relationship for the paper, which, like other CV owners, had previously syndicated HomeGain’s “valuation tool.” The tool is a box on the real estate section that home owners can use to look up property values – and access other parts of HomeGain from there.

Cammarosano doesn’t anticipate any formal dealings with Trulia, which is handling real estate search on the site. “They are different things,” he noted, adding that business for HomeGain is probably healthier than for other real estate services since it is supported by leads, rather than ads, which are way down. Agents are still trying to sell houses, he observed.

In addition to leads, HomeGain has done well selling search-optimized Web pages, which are available for agents in 2,000 different ZIP codes. “Average” fees run from $400 to $500, but he cautioned that prices vary, given the wide scope of HomeGain customers, who include both full-service agents and brokerages, and limited service firms such as ZipRealty. The company has about 5,000 subscribers for its various services.

Weeks after its decision to abandon its Print Ads program, Google has done the same with its sister program for radio ads. Both programs offered ad buying capability in their respective media, through Google’s AdWords online ad platform.

The company essentially cited the same reason that it did for newspapers: “It didn’t have the impact we hoped for.” The remaining piece of this once three-headed traditional media division is its TV Ads program, which is reportedly doing well.

In April, we saw that the “audio ads” program was hitting a bump. While Google claimed affiliations with 1,600 FM and AM radio stations, it alienated some radio station owners by trying to force them to commit a percentage of a wide swath of inventory. 

Specifically, there were complaints that Google cut revenues after it made a deal with Clear Channel for 5 percent of the radio station giant’s inventor. This included both premium inventory, such as drive time, and remnant inventory at off hours.  The Clear Channel deal made sense for Google at the time, since it provided enough desirable inventory to be taken seriously by quality advertisers. But it placed competing stations at a disadvantage. 

Additional Reporting by Peter Krasilovsky

Google announced earlier this week that it will offer a search box to mobile Web publishers to plant on their sites and share revenues from search results. This will be an extension of the existing AdSense for Mobile program.

Overall, the move really isn’t a big surprise: Google is following the same path it did online many years ago by partnering with publishers and getting their search box planted in as many places as possible on the mobile Web.

Its overall efforts with AdSense for Mobile should be successful, not just because it’s Google, but also because it will be very competitive with its offers to publishers. Online, it offers a roughly 80/20 revenue split in favor of publishers.

It’s also interesting to note different strategies by search rivals to jockey for positioning on the mobile Web. Yahoo and Microsoft have gone after carriers with search deals in place with AT&T and Verizon, respectively. These place mobile search engines on the carrier deck that comes with phones that run on these networks.

But Google’s placing its bet on off-deck searches, which are growing as the mobile Web becomes more and more like the online Web. This is mostly a result of the bar that’s been raised by the iPhone, and continued smartphone penetration, which is almost 20 percent of U.S. mobile users, according to TKG data.

Through this, a growing number of users are taking advantage of the full Web browsing capabilities of their phones, and going off deck. If you think about it, this is more like the Web as we know it — you can go wherever you want rather than being stuck with the tools on the home page that your ISP gives you.

Mobile user behavior is quickly evolving, so it’s hard to say what standards will emerge. But as the mobile Web becomes more and more like the online Web, online search behavior could carry over to the mobile environment. This bodes well for Google and its dominant position in online search.