I'm curious what kinds of sites people think should be returned for a search term of "mattress", if not mattress shopping sites?
Plenty of relevant results, zero ads.
When somebody searches "mattress", 99% of the time, they want to buy one.
> When somebody searches "mattress", 99% of the time, they want to buy one.
This is unfounded I suspect but it would be a reasonable justification for Google's results.
My point is, searching for just mattress should reasonably and logically include a small sampling of 'all' related topics. As by your own words, specific implications behind the search should be left to additional keywords. Assuming the search is for the purposes of buying, without specifying that, is certainly more profitable to google than a small sampling of all related topics, but not what most users want when simply searching for a vague general thing or concept.
Search engine A, when someone queries "mattress", shows a page of options to buy a mattress.
Search engine B, when someone queries "mattress", shows a light touch on a number of different aspects of mattresses, including a history, the wikipedia page, and so on.
Which one is doing a better job of showing relevant results to the user? I would suggest A.
What's the case here, is that mattress store owners, in the conversion to online sales, have purchased, not only the adword for "mattress", but paid for all manner of SEO tricks and hackery in order to drive their site to the top of the results. Far in excess of what a hobbyist could or would bother with.
It's a long shot, but the long tail of the Internet says that this has happened at least once. Someone was just poking around came across a random mattress myth or fact page, and found out that something they hate about their mattress isn't something they have to put up with. Whether that's "being tricked" into buying a mattress they didn't need, I won't say, but it still tickles an intellectually curious itch that I didn't even know I had, to find out that it’s illegal to purchase a mattress on Sundays in Washington.
A single word query like "mattress" is vague and starting from first principles, we live under capitalism, assume everyone's trying to sell you something, and a search for "mattress" proves to be no exception. Same goes for if you search for "windows". Second link is how to get it (for $199).
Because that's their business?
If I'm a buyer, I would expect to see the most trafficked, most popular, most bought deep linked online mattress shopping page - as the first link. I'm ok if that is after one or two ads.
If the search engine was trustworthy then I will click on that deep linked product page, cursorily glance the user reviews to see if there are any red flags, if not, then quickly empty my wallet and be done with my shopping for a mattress.
You'd never know it by the google results, but there are robust hobbyist communities dedicated to exposing the underlying information (and misinformation) about mattresses and the companies that make them. The Mattress Underground is a good example [0]
This is an interesting case in point - you might never even know what you're missing if google doesn't even hint that it exists, because it buries things under ads! A generalizable way to "hack" google into showing you useful results when a keyword is so polluted with SEO and ads is to add the word "forums" to your search string, although even that is no guarantee.
[0] https://www.themattressunderground.com/mattress-forum.html
Admittedly it's not the best example. But personally I'd weight sites offering unbiased information (some of which may indeed be happen to be merchants) higher than those trying to shove "the world's #1 mattress" down my throat.