Relevancy in Organic Searches

Relevancy and clickthrough counts in PPC. Why not in organic?

[Born_User]

Think about it. Google has made it clear that they try to promote relevancy by measuring clickthrough rates in the adwords program. Their philosophy is: If someone types in "keyword string" but users seldom or never click on a particular site, then Google is less likely to show that site in the future, thus improving the overall search experience for the user. Sites that have high clickthrough rate are more likely to stay in the results list.

Why couldn't they extend that same philosophy to organic searches as well? Here's the scenario to think about...

A website creates a page about dung beetles. Once the page gets spidered and indexed, it will start to show up in the serps when "dung beetle pictures" is searched. Is it possible that the page will get higher or lower rank depending on how many users actually visit that page from that search result listing?

If Google was serious about their relevancy philosophy, then wouldn't it make sense that they would also apply that to the organic search experience?

And... if that's the case, wouldn't it be to our benefit to try to increase clickthroughs on certain terms and pages, by whatever means possible? If it's likely, then I could conceive of a whole industry that's designed to do nothing more than generate clickthroughs for certain term-page combinations.

I am still a youngster when it comes to a lot of this, so if I've proposed something that is not even remotely possible, I apologize in advance. But, honestly, if I were Google, maybe that's something I'd want to include in the equation when it comes time to run an update.

Has anyone thought of this before?