Smoke and Mirror recommendations -- Vox Populi

What do socialite Lois Pope and lawyer Tim Broas have in common?

Someone is paying for Google-searches of their names. "Reputation" firms offer a few cents for each search. Some paid-search is legit (e.g. keeping tabs on where one ranks), but most is an attempt to "game" widely-used search-engines..

Fake everything: Other than search, "workers" will post fake reviews for books, and even for photo-portfolios put up by models. They will plagiarize articles and post them to a site that is pretending to be informative. Recently, a businessman was convicted for posting negative Yelp reviews about his competitor's business. Another businessman claims that Yelp offered to bury negative reviews for a fee. The New York attorney recently went after people posting fake reviews to Yelp, and other such sites. Even the Israeli government is paying students for positive reviews. Wikipedia just cancelled 250 sock-puppet user accounts used by a paid PR firm.

Physical world: Back in the physical world, the author of "Leapfrogging" figured out how to make the WSJ Best seller list: by selling 3000 copies rapidly. This is achieved by having 3,000 orders being placed on Amazon prior to publication, so that they're all triggered when the book hits the street.  Via Amazon Mechanical Turk, you can have 3,000 separate people place orders for your book, and even have them delivered to (say) 3,000 CEOs. [Perhaps WSJ should shift to a monthly-model, and also publish a list of books where sales suddenly plummeted.]

Detection and Control: Yelp says they suppress 25% of reviews as suspicious. Google tries to counter fake searches. That's why "reputation" firms limit how much they pay per 'worker' per day (so that Google does not get suspicious?) They often disallow workers from India, Pakistan, Philippines, etc.,

Ideas: Google should sign up as "workers" and do some "fake search" assignments. Except, instead of adding to real search results, they should collect details of who is paying for search, and then bury them. Another counter-intuitive possibility is to make a tool that makes fake-search easier for the "workers". If they could offer workers a tool that makes fake search easier (e.g. by doing multiple at a time, and by being tailored to the types of things "reputation" firms ask for) they could allow workers to earn, while the "clients" wonder why their page-rank falls. Google should have true stories to tell, about people who tried all sorts of techniques, but got buried as a result. Another counter-measure would be for Google to pretend to be a "reputation" firm, hire workers, collect their IPs, and stop recording their searches for ranking.

Not new: Fake reviews are not new, as anyone with an Amway or Herbalife "friend" can tell you. Yet, those two companies have great sales and profits, so pretence can work on some, and to some extent. I think it will always be that way: people will use "signals" that are flawed. It is similar to people who use the Nobel Prize or the New York Times as a signal, to conclude that Paul Krugman's spin is more accurate than (say) Tyler Cowen's balanced approach.

Caveat Emptor: People will always try to game a system: i.e. to achieve the "letter" of the metrics, without fulfilling the spirit. Advertising is useful, but comes packaged with spin. For the Oscars, panelists get "background" presentations, trying to influence them in favor of the pitchman's movie. You cannot be immune from being fooled by smoke and mirrors, but I'm confident that rational folk can adjust to the new fakeness like they did to the old. While Google and Yelp help by counter-measures, everyone else can keep the impact low by healthy scepticism. Let your cousin buy the network-marketed mattress with magnets -- it ain't for you.