PageRank, Citations and how big pharma has blackhatted the drug industry

I’m sorry, I don’t have much time, but here are some quick notes. Source: Lessig’s lecture on corruption.
http://lessig.org/blog/2007/10/corruption_lecture_alpha_versi.html

Google’s seminal idea of pagerank follows directly from the model of scientific journals cross referencing and citing one another for authority. It didn’t take long for spammers to recognize that an easy way to game the system is to create more links. It turns out that the idea is not original at all.

[on video 32:29] It was found that companies were paying physician scientists to publish the same results of the same trials in different journals; under different author’s names, with no cross referencing

Another way to game Google was via Pay Per Post. Guess what? It’s not new in the drug industry either.

offering tens of thousands of dollars simply to reviews of a drugs efficacy - reviews they have never seen before and which were always favourable to the drug.