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?
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.