Tracking Click Thrus

In certain business sectors

[ukgimp]

I have to watch the serps in a particular area and have noticed the G are monitoring click thrus. I know this has been reported in the past. Does anyone have any idea what they are using the small amount of data for.

They monitor, not just the url but also its position within the serps. There is also a number appended to the url which is constant all the way through:

G/url?sq=ua&start=X&q=Y/&e=Z

Where
X = position of site in serp
Y = the url
Z = a four digit number

Any thoughts? This is a sector where G have intervened and removed a site and mentioned the removal at the bottom of the serps.

[fom2001uk]

Are they introducing a click popularity measure into their algo any time soon?

Hasn't that been tried already? (DirectHit)

[Yidaki]

Redirect urls on Google SERPS [webmasterworld.com]

Fellow member GoogleGuy said Nov 6, 2002 on msg #:46:

We normally don't track redirects on urls because it slows users down. That data is useful though, so we sometimes do random sampling to make sure that our quality is still high. ...
Checking on clickthrough a miniscule amount of the time is something that we've done for a long time...

and on msg #:48:

We do our best not to slow users down. But we also do our best to measure our quality. So tracking redirects a small amount of the time seems like a pretty good compromise.

I guess we'll don't hear more than this.

More past discussions and more linked threads: Google Recording Clickthroughs [webmasterworld.com].

[edited by: Yidaki at 4:00 pm (utc) on Sep. 15, 2003]

[Fiver]

I saw this about three days ago on a SERP that didn't have any removal notices.

It looked a lot like it did when I saw it a few months ago... both times on competitive area SERPS

really.. it only makes sense that they would want those statistics.. it's almost essential information to know now that they have advertising statistics to place it beside.