Halfdeck - 5:57 am on Jun 25, 2007 (gmt 0)

My thinking is that if end-users rarely formulate a search that chooses a certain URL, then even if other quality factors are in place, Google may not want to include such a URL in their main index for performance reasons.

Good point. I do have pages targeting nonsensical terms in the main index that hardly gets any clicks/views, but the thought have crossed my mind.

I also notice Google going out of its way to rank pages that don't contain all the words in a query instead of ranking a supplemental page targeting a long tail.

For example, "blue widgets red boots sunday california idaho pointy hats" bring up 100 pages of results from the main page. None of them are supplemental. This inspite the fact that Googlers hinted at more traffic from supplemental results in the future.

Relevance, in cases like this, seems to be less important to ranking than page "importance."

Even if Google filtered out pages with infrequent views/CTR, their results probably won't look much different than it does now.

[edited by: Halfdeck at 5:58 am (utc) on June 25, 2007]