Although the next U.S. presidential election won't take place until November 2012, the race is already well underway, and stories about it appear prominantly in the U.S. news media everyday. This has caused a particular sub-issue - call it "red widgets" -- to get more public attention than normal.
I recently noticed that an old article about red widgets has moved considerably higher in Google's rankings in searches for "widgets" (a more general term). Until this happened, the top ten results for this term had been very stable for several years. I'm not sure where the old article about red widgets had previously ranked, but it wasn't on the first page until recently, and today it has moved all the way up to number 3.
My theory is that the number of searches for "red widgets" has significantly increased over the last few months, due to news coverage of the U.S. election, and that this has caused this old article to move higher even for search terms like "widgets" for which it previously wasn't in the top 10, but is now number 3. In other words, when people search for "widgets", the Google algorithm thinks that they might really be looking for "red widgets", and therefore gives this old article a higher ranking than it would otherwise get.
So I'm suggesting that search frequency might be one of the factors that Google incorporates into its algorithm.
