i remember the good old days where you'd type a song title and 'lyrics' into a search engine, and you'd get a couple fan pages with lyrics... now you get 4000 different lyrics sites, all with tons of popup ads... what gives??

it's easier to make webpages nowadays.

I remember www.lyrics.ch, back when it was yellow....Very simple website, awesome search [by artist, title, album, text string, etc.] Had a newsgroup for people to post and answer requests, and took submissions from the people hitting the site. Then the 'industry' heard about it, and started cracking down because obviously by reading and being able to actually find the artist/song that I heard on the radio so I could buy it and support the artist/label, that violated their copyright and they'd rather I not know who the heck I was listening to......Not sure if you can tell how I feel about that..
But you're right, finding a good lyric site that has anything other than the top 20 Eminem or Shania Twain songs is rather challenging...I have a couple bookmarked on my home PC that were decent, but nowhere near as good as lyrics.ch used to be. The more alternative/underground the band is, the better the chance of finding something useful [if anything at all], I think.

I always stay away from a site that has "lyric" anywhere in their web address. They're usually a breeding ground for popups.

You're better off looking for a band's fansite for lyrics.