If you observe most people as they browse the Internet (or even just use a computer) you'll notice a familiar pattern. While casually browsing new web sites, people typically spend a short amount of time on a web site before leaving the site for somewhere else.
From the point of view of a programmer, this is a huge problem. Some of us try to make a living doing web design and there is a great need to minimize what's known as bounce rate. Bounce rate is simply a percentage that tells you the relative number of people who visit your site and leave shortly thereafter. Having a low bounce rate is good, because that usually means people stay on your web site for extended periods of time.
It can be suggested that the Internet goes against traditional ways of reading and information processing, in that people often only skim the surface of a web site before moving on. As a web designer, if you design your web site well and "do everything right*" you tend to cause the opposite phenomenon. Instead of having someone visit your web site, followed by their quick departure, people will tend to stay if you have a good web site.
Take my favorite community web site, Stack Overflow (SO), a web site designed for programmers of all kinds. Ask any programmer who regularly uses it and you'll find they tend to spend a lot of time on SO. Most people who use it typically invest non-trivial amounts of time into asking, answering, and viewing questions.
It's not exact, but this is almost the opposite of those who are casually browsing the Internet, going from web site to web site. I'm in no way suggesting that people jump from web site to web site because the designer who created the web site was a terrible web designer. But the case can be made that good web design leads to a lower bounce rate. In turn, this means people are probably more deeply entrenched in your web site. Remember, causation does not imply correlation!
You can just as easily make a counterargument that other web sites (Like Google) are fostering the skimming behavior, due to the way that they make it easy to access vast amounts of data in an easy and manageable way. But that's life; Nothing is absolute. These are simply two common patterns you can find in all the data.
*Note: I'm being a bit vague here because there's a lot of small details that go into this that are beyond the scope of this post. Besides, I'm not a web designer so I don't even know half of them.
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