TheMadScientist - 8:45 pm on Dec 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

I threw this up on the home page as a nominee for thread of the year.

Reading the home page info and thinking back a bit made me remember something about time of the day, day of the week, and specific result clicks having to do with rankings... I don't remember the entirety, but it was part of one of the patent applications from a few years ago.

It made me start wondering if the 'throttling effect' is so hard to pin down and understand because it's not 'throttling' directly, but rather time-dependent result sets of some type...

It doesn't explain the 'totally level' traffic described in one of the situations, but I'm wondering if what appears to be a 'throttling effect' maybe has a different cause?