A woman in her sixties Googling for "nordstrom" is a Nordstrom customer.

Of course. That's why I said "keep" and not acquire. What I meant is Nordstrom would rather pay Google to not lose the customer to some other site because of the placement of ads on Google.

Sooner or later the new middleman will always start to behave like the old middleman. Before it was the yellow pages, now it's google.