The original link seems to be a search result, which makes me wonder could this be used as some sort of SEO technique.

I'm not implying that this was OP's intention, just that from what basic understanding of SEO I have, Google takes into consideration click through rates of a link, higher click throughs resulting in more favorable rankings.

So, theoretically, if you could get a lot of people to visit an article using Google's search link, instead of a direct link, would that somehow convince Google to rank it more favorably?

Again, not something I'm accusing the OP of, just generally wondering.