Thanks for the post, I enjoyed reading your thought process on this. I have to interject that you make some great points, but I think it can be explained a little differently as to why this phenomena happens. My mind jumps to quality score in Adwords. Traditionally quality score would be calculated by the relevance of the ad compared with keyword group and quality/relevance of the landing page. Additionally, signals such as time on site and even goal conversions in analytics have been thought to influence quality score. When quality scores increase, your ads can show in a higher position or the same position for a lower cpc thus “allowing you to spend more” over your competitors by winning a higher position or being able to show more frequently (than you competitor) within your daily budget.

In short, I think that what you’re explaining would be something like a temporary influx in quality score when the destination site is updated (blog) and social signals are detected. It’s fair to assume that Google can and does take factors such as freshness of content and social impact into account when determining the organic search results. I can only conclude that the same is true for ad results.

When you say that “Google can simply “print” more search result sets or feed existing sets to a larger number of buyers ” you want to remember that there’s still only as many results as there are actual searches and there’s only as many advertisers as there are in the bid for certain keywords.

Hopefully I’m making sense with the quality score idea, albeit; quality score hasn’t “traditionally” just changed daily, but I could certainly see why Google would want to do that. Afterall, if a site is updated regularly (blog) and has social influence, it can certainly signal to google that it’s a better quality result.

Thanks for taking me down the rabbit hole! Hope to talk to you soon.

Josh