Consumers are often in a "buy mindset" when searching for something. The phrasing of their search query can indicate it. For example, someone search for "cheap office chair" most likely already has their CC in hand. It's a search query that belongs as much on Amazon or Craigslist as it does on Google. So when it's searched on Google, the idea is that the market will provide more relevant results than an algorithm designed for ranking articles based around keywords and semantic equivalence of the content.
> So when it's searched on Google, the idea is that the market will provide more relevant results than an algorithm designed for ranking articles based around keywords and semantic equivalence of the content.
And the market does this in a relatively simple manner: by letting merchants bid on search keywords, and showing the site of the merchant with the highest bid, you force merchants to either lose money or be relevant.
In other words, the most relevant merchants to a search phrase will have the most money to bid up visibility for that phrase because they make the most money, on average, from users looking for this particular thing.
