The motive they have is to increase revenue from advertising. It so happens that “time on page” is a metric that advertisers care a lot about. Ad buyers pay mor

The motive they have is to increase revenue from advertising. It so happens that “time on page” is a metric that advertisers care a lot about. Ad buyers pay more for space on pages where users spend a lot of time. I’m not surprised at all that Google chose this as a metric. It’s very different from a metric that emphasises quality for the user. “The biggest problem facing users of Web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users’ horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. “ https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatomy.pdf https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...