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Browserfingerprinting, they see you again on ther resultspage after x seconds -> bad result. They don't see you again -> good result.

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That's not how I use the results page, though. I open the top x number of results in separate tabs, and then check those pages. I only go back to the tab with the results page after I've checked them all, so that might be a while, even if they all suck.

So if they look at my behaviour the way you say, then the feedback they'd get from me would be that the top x-1 results are always bad, while the xth result is always good. That sounds like a poor algorithm for them, but it might explain why my Google results always suck.

Thanks to things like Google Analytics, Google knows what site you're viewing at any moment in time. It can see you go through the results sequentially and stop at some point.

Luckily for search, it is how the vast majority of users use things. Less than 1% of users doing things differently makes the stats a little messier, but still works quite well.

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