Question

A search engine returns 2 results A and B for search “play game XYZ”.
People who click on result B spend a much longer time and play a lot more XYZ games at site B, while clickers to site A leave the site after a short visit.

I’d imagine site B is a better search result than site A even though it’s possible that site B is new and has few links to it in comparison with A. I assume better search engines would take this into account.

My question is, if so, how do they keep track of usage pattern of a search result in the real world?

Answer 1

There are two issues here:

1. If a user plays game B a lot – he is likely to write and link about it (blogs, reviews, social networks,….) If he does it, the static score of B will raise. This is a part of Page Rank algorithm, that gives the static score of each page and helps the Search Engine decide which page is better.
2. There is another factor that some Search Engines use: If a user clicked a page, but searched the same/similar query very soon after it – it is likely he did not found what he was after. In this case, the search engine can assume the page is not a good fit ti the query and reduce the score given to this page.

Other then it, the SE cannot really know “how much time you played a game” (unless you revisit it multiple times, by researching the query – and not navigate to it directly, and then it can use the #times the user navigated to the game by searching)