I'm not convinced that it would - is there a qualitative difference between page 2-3 or even pages 1-10 of Google results and the first results on page 1? A random mix of the first 10 pages of results say I'd say would be more interesting than their current mostly static and gamed results, which are basically pay to play.

The most valuable thing about this idea is that it is immune to gaming because of the mixing. Just as an example relevant to the point of the original article, here is a search for hotels in Devon on google:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=hotels%20in%20devon

First half of the page are links to Google places entries - so advertising for Google. Are these paid for? I'm not sure what the situation is there but this is partly a manual intervention from Google to try to save their results... After that on page 1 we have lots of aggregator/review sites like laterooms, tripadvisor, stayindevon etc (your results may vary). by the second page of results we have some real hotels, by the third, we have more real hotels, etc, up to page 9, which is still real hotels in devon.

So I'd say the first 10 pages are pretty much equally useful, and some mixing of results would do wonders for ranking and allow good results to surface instead of languishing unless they make an entry on a google property, or on one of the portals.