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magfrump comments on Med Patient Social Networks Are Better Scientific Institutions - Less Wrong
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I intuitively agree with your fears, with a mild caveat or two; how much of my fear comes from not respecting doctors? How much comes from boo lights for social networking? Or did I have applause lights and am overcompensating for them?
Since I have no idea what your sentence means past "I fear...Google's problem" I think a lot of my agreement is bias. What might help is a better explanation of what the persistent factor is and how it would get corrupted.
Of course generally treating information as information and science as science is good, but making fast medical decisions involving lots of money and major health issues seems like a good place to introduce new information that could help lots of people. Skepticism is good but barriers to use and acceptance could be harmful.
"Google's problem" = "Search engine optimization" = people with an agenda trying to game the algorithm (so their site gets ranked higher than better ones). For example, linkspam makes "number of inbound links" a less reliable metric of site quality than it would otherwise be.
If something is known to be used as a proxy for quality and people are rewarded accordingly, then you'll end up with people trying to achieve the proxy for quality at the expense of actual quality.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the original topic, though. Are you anticipating that quacks will go on sites like this and say "You should buy my snake oil - look at all these sockpuppets that it's helped!"
But isn't that exactly what happens in science too? Citation stat gaming, ghostwritten papers, senior person's name first, etc.?
And those kinds of gaming are much harder for outsiders to detect, as well as harder to fix or regulate, especially when they're the commonly accepted official practices.
So even if the public data aggregation approach is more open to gaming, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's more vulnerable to gaming. Gaming might also be much easier to detect and/or eliminate by automated or semi-automated means.
I'm saying it's definitely a concern.
Okay, that clarifies things.