[hbbio]

I love how the (now famous) researchers dismiss at the time what has become Google's main chase:

"These types of personalized PageRanks are virtually immune to manipulation by commercial interests. For a page to get a high PageRank, it must convince an important page, or a lot of non-important pages to link to it. At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements(links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money"

[rahrahrah]

And yet, everything in that paragraph is absolutely true. If anything, they have stopped short from taking it to its logical conclusions. Since it costs money, only when more money than it costs is involved will this take place.

[rahrahrah]

To go further, the implicit assumption that they were making when stopping short was: Google will never be big enough that people will spend money to manipulate it. But it did, and people do.

To me this reinforces that you should take seriously things like 50% bitcoin attacks. If bitcoins become valuable enough, someone will do it.