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Alexandros comments on Is Google Paperclipping the Web? The Perils of Optimization by Proxy in Social Systems - Less Wrong
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Thanks for this. I'm constantly amazed at the relevant information that has been turning up here.
I agree that if anything is to be improved, information from other stakeholder groups with different incentives (such as end users) must be integrated. Given the amount by which end-users outnumber manipulators, this is a pretty good source of data, especially for high-traffic keywords.
However, what would stop spammers that focus on some low-traffic keyword to start feeding innocent-looking user logs into the system? I guess the fundamental question is, besides raw quantity, how would someone trust the user logs to be coming from real end-users?
(I understand that it may not be possible for you to get into a discussion about this, if so, no worries)
I'm afraid I can't say much beyond what I've already said, except that Google places a fairly high value on detecting fraudulent activity.
I'd be surprised if I discovered that no bad guys have ever tried to simulate the search behavior of unique users. But (a) assuming those bad guys are a problem, I strongly suspect that the folks worried about search result quality are already on to them; and (b) I suspect bad guys who try such techniques give up in favor of the low hanging fruit of more traditional bad-guy SEO techniques.