As already mentioned it can give a quick indication of high priority reports. If there's a lot of reports then its more likely to be serious as a lot of users around here don't report every rule breaking post, and instead only report when they think its urgent. Think malicious links, and the usual. We moderators should probably just do CTRL + F, and search commonly used keywords, but generally we take a quick glance, and act on more serious ones first. Some moderators might just do it chronologically. We all have our own different methods, but a unhandled report doesn't mean much at all. I would say that almost all reports which are left unhandled has been seen by at least 2 different staff members.