Hittail's Secret Sauce

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?