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I mean in theory they are helping the popular get more popular and the new (and possibly more relevant) kid on the block has a hard time breaking into the top 10. That is in fact if Direct Hits technology even does something useful. I don't see it.
I can't see why an engine would need click pop counters on serps anyway. The top 10 are going to get more clicks and the top 5 will get the most.
So what happens if I go to a site and don't come back...must be a great site, huh? I've spent an indefinite time at 'site x' so it must be a good site. What if I go do something else while I'm at a site and it looks like I'm there longer than I really was?
The whole thing sounds like somebody wrote a perl script one afternoon for counting clicks and then wrote up an intense marketing plan posing as a search engine and used some high level contacts to milk money out of existing search engines for as long as they can get away with it. That's where they put the engineering skill.
Some user behaviors will mess up the results. I tend to open up new windows as I click on results, which will screw up click pop duration numbers. Some may click on a link and then never go back, even it the link was useless. Others may search for "industrial magnets", see an out-of-place listing for "Britney Bikini photos", and spend 20 minutes checking them out. However, at least for popular searches, there is probably enough data to create some statistical clustering. If in a thousand searches for a keyword, four hundred skip over the #2 listing, and another four hundred click on it but return in seconds, chances are it's not really relevant.
