It's just you pretending search engines are simpler then they are. Noone's just ranking most clicked sites first - that's too naive and encourages clickbait. Cl

It's just you pretending search engines are simpler then they are. Noone's just ranking most clicked sites first - that's too naive and encourages clickbait. Clicks are an ingredient in the overall ranking system, which is generally also trained on relevancy labels by human annotators/raters/assessors. These human labels are far more reliable and can penalize all the bad clickbaity stuff which clicks can't, but unfortunately also very expensive to obtain and thus low volume. We may not know exactly why you clicked back, or why Joe wasted 15 minutes on a site, but from all clicks in aggregate and from the human-labelled data, we can tell how that correlates with the clicked site's relevancy and quality and utilize your clicks accordingly to improve the ranking. Finding such correlations is still by far and large what all search engines do, rather than trying to truly understand the query. It's only now starting to change with recent advances in deep learning and NLP.