Is Google now measuring traffic to determine relevance?

For the last month, many UK Google results are highly intriguing.

[James_Dale]

Currently, every time I perform a search in Google.co.uk, I am getting tracking codes in the status bar. This phenomenon used to be a temporary 'glitch' which would disappear within a day or two. However, for the last month, it is happening for every single search.

Additionally, the UK Google results I see for many searches are 100% different to any of the known datacentre results. I am surprised noone else has mentioned this here yet.

Is Google.co.uk sorting sites (for some results) according to traffic levels? Is it being used as a testbed for a new algorithm?

[instand1]

I have tried google.co.uk for "yahoo": 109,000,000 pages
I have tried google.de for "yahoo": 109,000,000 pages
And: google.com for "yahoo": 158,000,000 pages found.

No tracking-codes on all three, in my trials.

So it seems that the difference has to do with regional googles.

The difference between UK and DE is marginal: Only one of the pages ranked as the first ten is different.

[plasma]

There have been tracking-codes at google.de 2 days ago.
Also the SERPs where different (My site ranked higher ;)