Well, I think the idea is that the link Gawker released initially was the one that got passed around the most and posted on facebook page, twitter, etc. ( I know I posted it. )

As a result, I believe that would also be the URL that ranks highest in a Google search.

Regardless of what text gets added after the number so to an extent, for popular posts, whichever title Gawker releases first will be set in stone.

I'm not very familiar with regexes so I don't really understand why they would need one on the URL. It seems you can drop the string part of that "suffix" altogether.