How does this track the "open a ton of tabs in the background from search and then cull them" workflow? Can they know which ones I actually spend time on vs eyeball and quickly close?
They can tell if you opened links in new tabs rather than by clicking on them sequentially, and can tell that you kept the search results live in its own tab for at least n seconds after opening tabs (x, y, z) in quick succession. Voodoo, err I mean ML, can deduce a lot from that.
It's really not. Google, famous for never giving users control over UX, has a full-blown option to persistently save your preference to always open search results in a new window/tab.
