ohno - 6:12 am on Oct 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

Google has far more information available about these searchers than we do and I suspect it is capable of making a pretty fair evaluation (based on previous actions, etc.) about how "hot" these leads are. It could meter them out to various merchants, sending the hot ones one direction for a while, etc. But why? And why alternate over a multi-day period?

The only reason I can think of is to spread the $$$ around in the hope that more people may spend on Adwords? That would be a double edged sword, on one hand a webmaster can see good Google referals for a period, why not use Adwords to bump that even higher? Sales have slacked off but Google was good to us in the past, why not try an Adwords campaign to get sales back? I find it hard to believe that they do not have the data to serve correct pages to people given how long this seems to have been going for.....