They don't need to abuse their control of the browser to do this. They were capable of
and were inferring this info from people's visits to/from Google to determine whether a page was useful or not.
The problem is that SEO outfits gamified that metric as well. The idea of determining whether a site is useful based on how long the user stayed on it only served to cause sites to hide information halfway down the page.
That idea is THE CAUSE of the meme about recipe sites telling you how your long-dead great-great-great grandma wrote this recipe for a special event and how it has become a family staple and some of the ingredients might not exist anymore in the same way they did, before they get around to giving you the recipe.
Recipe sites were HUGE in the heyday of the DotCom boom and the only way to get your page to rank higher than every other online cookbook was to capture people's attention with a story before showing them what they came there for. If they can just get what they came for and leave, you got downranked as not a useful site.
The problem is that SEO outfits gamified that metric as well. The idea of determining whether a site is useful based on how long the user stayed on it only served to cause sites to hide information halfway down the page.
That idea is THE CAUSE of the meme about recipe sites telling you how your long-dead great-great-great grandma wrote this recipe for a special event and how it has become a family staple and some of the ingredients might not exist anymore in the same way they did, before they get around to giving you the recipe.
Recipe sites were HUGE in the heyday of the DotCom boom and the only way to get your page to rank higher than every other online cookbook was to capture people's attention with a story before showing them what they came there for. If they can just get what they came for and leave, you got downranked as not a useful site.