lucy24 - 10:05 pm on Nov 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

They can inundate all they like. What takes time is finding the Advanced Search so you can tell them exactly what you're looking for. Grr. (Book by author x, with word y in the title-- is this approach so arcane that you will only offer it as a last resort? They've started hiding it in Google Books too.)

I've yet to understand how g### gets usable information from those searchers who open a bunch of likely hits in concurrent tabs and then read them one by one, closing as they go-- meaning that the time spent on a page will be a function of the results ordering itself, not of page quality. The only thing they can measure is the combined time spent looking at the complete batch-- and then only if all of them were so useless it's time for another search.

I have to remember it myself too. The page-opening time shown in logs may not have anything to do with what time the visitor first physically saw the page. Maybe they didn't really spend 15 minutes. It was 14 minutes on some other site from the same search before they even got to your tab.