How often a site is selected from the SERPs would not be a good way to measure site poluarity. We have all opened a site that looked good from the title and 2 lines of site description only to find it is not, spam even. Besides, it would be complex to weigh the fact that sites higher in the SERPs would naturally tend to get a higher number of clicks.

I have seen the suggestion somewhere that it would be good to monitor when a site gets put into a user's 'favorites'. Not bad, but many sites we might feel are good we would not necessarily want to store this way.

Explicit user ranking is one way forward but could be open to abuse (?). This requires user action in any case which perhaps few users would bother with.

The best way I think to gather data about user rating of sites would be to monitor how long a users keep a site selected from the SERPs open in their browser - but this presents a technical problem. It could be solved by 'spies' downloaded to our system but this would not be popular. Not sure if there is a 'safer' way to allow this.

The toolbars that search engines offer for browsers could feasibly do the monitoring of site open times and should certainly do that in preference to simply monitoring which sites are selected. Maintaing an average of site open times per search term would seem a good way to go. Perhaps they do this alrady and take it into account in the algos. No idea. But it seems to me a good idea.

Just thinking aloud.

Steve