This is nice example, but you kinda missed the point.

This search algorithm is purposely making the search engine to sleep for maximum amount of time even if the results come faster. This is really done with the user in mind like you said and not the company. They are, "The users are not stupid, they will notice if some of our searches take longer than others"

I dislike wasting cpu cycles for unrelated reasons like "Users are stupid, they wont notice that it runs slow." so lets use this because it's easy to use without considering the effect on the users.