An extremely easy way for a bunch of people to get together and destroy someone's ranking? That doesn't sound like such a good idea.
So yeah it can be done.
Not only do you have to bypass the captcha, but also the heuristics that google could (does?) employ to detect fake accounts.
If the votes were weighted by account activity then the spammers would not only have to sign up and vote; they would also have to keep all these accounts busy with fake queries or other means.
Keeping all those accounts active, cycling out dead accounts etc. could take quite an ongoing infrastructure investment.
Moreover google could give significantly more weight to accounts that look very real (i.e. actively using multiple google products for a long time) and thereby further devalue the botnet impact.
It's yet another arms race of course. But one with fairly good odds I would think.
If you have a botnet, you shouldn't have much trouble doing that.
Of course, anything can be gamed... But it's better than nothing.
If I were to create a web-app with user-generated content, I would try to create a "trust" system based on a "reputation" / "real person" metric. It may come from his StackOverflow / reddit / HN reputation, his Google Account activity, Facebook activity...
Before buying a product based on a review I read on a forum, I always look at the author's post count / history / reputation. That's why I like HN / Reddit and their Karma systems. We need to automate that
Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in any one keyword niche: not so often.
Many websites live off a handful of visitors a day coming from a few core keywords and associated long-tail traffic. For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites.
Why do you assume a flawed implementation?
Naturally there would be thresholds. There is no reason to devalue a site that's only displayed in 100 search-results/day at all.
The sites we want to hit are orders of magnitude worse at polluting the results. We're talking about the Mahalo's and expert sexchanges.
For example, for a low competition keyword, 1 link can make a big difference to a site's rankings. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. It's the same algorithm affecting the rankings in both cases, just in the latter case there's a lot more data being used as input.
That's the way they seem to do things, so I'm guessing there's a fair chance they'd take a similar approach to the influence of down-votes on rankings, if they went down that road.
There'd have to have some sorts of thresholds, but there'll always be points above which the algorithm can be gamed, just like pretty much every other aspect of their ranking algorithm can be gamed.
Right now, in a low-volume-keyword niche, a sleazy operator can kill the rankings of competing sites pretty easily by buying them a few dirty links and letting Google's algorithm do the rest. If a site hasn't got lots of quality links pointing to it, and let's face it, the vast majority of sites don't, it's pretty easy for someone to kill its rankings.
A lot of people say that it's impossible to affect the rankings of someone else's site, but that's simply not true. You can't easily affect the rankings of a big established site with lots of good links, but a little small-business site? The reality is it's pretty easy. I don't think Google have any interest in quashing that particular myth, because the reality is actually kind of scary for small business operating on the web.
(Apologies if I'm going off on a tangent there. You are absolutely right in pointing out that I was assuming a flawed implementation.)
Google seems to like building systems that automatically
scale across all keywords and niches
For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more
links to change anything.
Search "viagra": http://www.google.com/search?q=viagra
This is the third result (after wikipedia + viagra.com which have a hardcoded boost): http://www.genericviagrarx.net/
Here's a sample of links to it: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:genericviagrarx.net
I.e. there are thousands of forums / blogs where you can post your link to (even in a proper context, the more popular the subject the better). Hire a couple of offshore workers for $5 / hour, and in a week you'll have thousands of links pointing to you.
That site you point to has many more links than Google shows. You can check yahoo to get a more realistic count:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=www.genericvia...
But even that is probably only indexing a small fraction of the links that are likely to be pointing to that site. Generally when a site has a few thousand spammy links, they've usually got tens of thousands more that haven't been indexed.
Now I'm not for a second saying that that site should be ranking where it is, just because it has a lot of links. I really wish Google did a better job of discounting spammy links.
Basically they were leveraging off other people's work and charging for it.