By this do you mean popular people will rank more easily like they do now? How is popularity determined? By links?
re: How do you solve it?
You don't. At least, not how Google does it. Google is trying to act like the government of the internet and tries to manipulate behavior into things that align with Google's goals - primarily making money via AdWords. To achieve this goal, they try to discredit competing advertising paid link systems because they break Google's system. It's akin to twitter making it all but impossible to have a successful twitter client.
At some point, there is too much money in the current system to render what Google's webspam team does as much more than an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. They hit spam, more spam pops up elsewhere.
The only way for Google to make their algorithm better is to take out or dial back the "buyable" elements - the social ones like links, tweets, facebook fans, etc. They did this pretty effectively with AdWords over the years. It's harder with organic results, but not impossible. Arguably, for many people you could put 10 reasonable, relevant, non-spam results on the front page of a given search term and it would be "good enough" for many people. Something akin to DuckDuckGo.
Since this is a non-trivial problem what Google is doing is basically better than anyone else so far, and there is a lot of value in the social signals if only because it makes people care more about Google than they care about ranking on Twitter or Facebook. So, kudos to Google on what they're doing, but there is nothing inherent to search that requires a link to be a vote or for that to be such an important relevance factor.
By this do you mean popular people will rank more easily like they do now? How is popularity determined? By links?
re: How do you solve it?
You don't. At least, not how Google does it. Google is trying to act like the government of the internet and tries to manipulate behavior into things that align with Google's goals - primarily making money via AdWords. To achieve this goal, they try to discredit competing advertising paid link systems because they break Google's system. It's akin to twitter making it all but impossible to have a successful twitter client.
At some point, there is too much money in the current system to render what Google's webspam team does as much more than an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. They hit spam, more spam pops up elsewhere.
The only way for Google to make their algorithm better is to take out or dial back the "buyable" elements - the social ones like links, tweets, facebook fans, etc. They did this pretty effectively with AdWords over the years. It's harder with organic results, but not impossible. Arguably, for many people you could put 10 reasonable, relevant, non-spam results on the front page of a given search term and it would be "good enough" for many people. Something akin to DuckDuckGo.
Since this is a non-trivial problem what Google is doing is basically better than anyone else so far, and there is a lot of value in the social signals if only because it makes people care more about Google than they care about ranking on Twitter or Facebook. So, kudos to Google on what they're doing, but there is nothing inherent to search that requires a link to be a vote or for that to be such an important relevance factor.