SAN FRANCISCO (CNN/Money) - I don't know who likes Mamma.com better: the company's investors or the headline writers assigned to top off the spate of recent stories about it.

Trading of the Canadian search engine's stock, on a tear for the past couple of months, reached a fever pitch late last week when the company reported a profit of $1.38 million on $4.2 million in revenue. That's when the financial press really went to town with such witticisms as "Mamma and the Paupers."

While the headlines are good for a chuckle, I'm not sure what's in store for investors.

Since March, when the company's stock shot up from around $4 to more than $10 -- under circumstances that have since warranted an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission -- interest in Mamma (MAMA: Research, Estimates) has been high. Last Thursday the company's stock shot up 26 percent on volume of 22.7 million shares. The volume the previous day was only 1.8 million.

So why is everyone jumping up and down about this little company from the Great White North?

A few reasons: First, having transformed itself from a wireless-billing company called Intasys, Mamma is sitting in a hot spot: paid search. The company calls itself a "meta" search engine, because it combines the results from various other engines, aggregating traffic through its network of 5,500 partner sites and selling it to advertisers.

Second, it's attracted a high-profile, big-mouth investor in Mark Cuban, founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who now owns 6.3 percent of the firm.

And third, like many other companies in the search sector these days, it's doing pretty well financially -- although on a small scale. It's so small, in fact, that in surveying search analysts about the company, I found one who hadn't even heard of Mamma.

Undoubtedly that's because Mamma sits near the bottom of the search-site food chain. At the top of the heap, obviously, stand Google and Yahoo! (YHOO: Research, Estimates), followed on a short slope by AOL (TWX: Research, Estimates) and MSN (MSFT: Research, Estimates).

After those strata, however, there's a canyon, near the bottom of which you find operations like Mamma, FindWhat.com, and Infosys. These smaller entities offer advertisers far less traffic than the big firms, but also charge quite a bit less.

But the big question facing investors in the lower-rung companies is this: How long can such firms sustain themselves in that position before they're crushed or co-opted by bigger companies?

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"This whole space is going to consolidate because it can't support lots of players," says Greg Sterling, an analyst with the Kelsey Group. "Ultimately, I expect Mamma.com will be acquired. It's hard to believe these companies will survive as stand-alone entities."

To its credit, Mamma is in decent shape financially. It's kept its overhead very low, it has no debt, and it has $11.3 million in the bank.

It can probably survive on its own for some time if search trends continue on their current trajectory -- and if Mamma keeps its current cost structure. But that's a pretty big assumption, given the roller-coaster nature of search's history as an investment vehicle and considering Mamma's increased advertising and publicity spend in the first quarter.

If Mamma can continue growing its traffic partner network at a steady clip while keeping its costs low, I think it'll become the most attractive takeover target among the third-tier search companies.

In many ways, depending on the multiple paid by the acquirer, that's probably the best outcome Mamma's fans can hope for.

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