[friendzis]

The fact that they do collect data does not mean that they use that data in any meaningful way or at all.

They ought to see humongous bounce rates with those fake SEOd pages. Normally, that would suggest shit tier quality and black-hat SEO, which is in theory punishable. Yet, they throw that data away and still rank those sites higher up.

You mean to say that no one at Google has even heard of "external SEO", which is nothing more than fancy way of saying link farming? They do know, this is punishable according to their own rules, yet it works, because either they cannot fix it or do not care to.

[quantumofalpha]

They'll never tell how they use the data for obvious reasons and I also can't go into any details. But any obvious thing you can think of almost certainly has been tried, they've been doing it for 20+ years and ranking alone is staffed with several hundreds of smart engineers. Mining clickthrough logs is a fairly old topic itself, has been around since at least early 2000s.