I don't have any inside knowledge, but if you were Google, wouldn't you at least factor it into the equation?
We use Google Analytics. I noticed Google Bot, but not other buts, has increased crawl frequency steadily with our recent traffic spike, but the number of visitors from search engines is still quite low at this point. This correlation hints that Google may be using traffic data to prioritize crawl rates and it would seem a logical extension to prioritize search results.