> Successful clicks matter.

I wonder about this. If I click a link and read it and I find that it's garbage (e.g. got ranked based on SEO rather than useful content) does it count as a successful click? Worse yet, some of these sites have blatant errors that are only discovered after examination.

This is relative to technical subject matter. Other searches, such as shopping may not suffer this kind of problem (or I have not noticed it.)

I also wonder how Google knows a click is successful. If I open a link in another tab, does the browser tell Google how long I lingered on the site? Perhaps Chrome does but I use Firefox.