I think I know the
secret sauce of hittail. It might
possibly be the
distance between words in the page. It might also be the distance within a paragraph, or other delineators.
I know this because searching for a phrase for example "Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a growing number of digital audio players" shows 5 results
this one shows 7:
"Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a growing number of digital"
this one shows 1020:
"Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a growing number"
this one shows 1330:
"Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement"
The
greater the distance between the words the more under-performing potential energy the phrase has.
Discussion continues
here.
This is my intuitive hunch after my entirely unrelated examination of many serps. What do you think?