martinibuster - 4:49 am on Nov 12, 2007 (gmt 0)

I think that the real question is, why would Google rank this page #5 over the 489,000,000 other results for the same term when Adobe is a software company? When someone says "financial services" do you think Adobe?

The answer to the phrase Financial Services seems to be obvious, but there are more meanings than the seemingly obvious one and the SERP reflects that.

Financial Services is a broad term. That's why you see a dot gov in the results. Google's SERPs often reflects multiple user intentions and that's why you'll see news reports and dot gov sites.

Why Adobe? In this case Adobe has thousands of inbounds from financial services companies, has relevant text on the page, and the page is relevant for the phrase, financial services- although not in the way you would anticipate it to be. I'm not saying those are the exact reasons why it's ranking, only showing there are ample reasons for it to be there. So the better question is, Why not Adobe? It's totally relevant for alternative meanings of the phrase Financial Services - which means many different things to different people.

The most important thing to contemplate is that general terms have many meanings and that's when the SERPs tend to reflect the diversity of those meanings, regardless of what the seemingly obvious meaning is.