I was listening to Scientific America’s 60 Second Science Podcast and it was about a contest that the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island is sponsoring. Here is the information from the website.

Welcome to the ETAN Rating Challenge!

The ETAN Rating Challenge seeks smart and powerful attacks against on-line rating systems. If you can mislead the rating system more than other participating teams, you win the cash prizes and Winner Certificate, issued by the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island.

The attacking data provided by you will be used to evaluate existing algorithms, and help us to do research on more reliable on-line rating systems in the future. This grant challenge will not be used for any profitable or
commercial purpose.

Why participate? Cash, Fame, Good Cause, and Having Fun!

Please read the rules to see what is required to win the prize. If you are interested, you can register a team. You can also check how other teams are doing on the leaderboad.

Good Luck and thank you for helping!

The experiment sounds very interesting and looks to be right up the alley of the SEO folks who seem to have great luck in working the Search Engine ratings. I wonder if anyone who is doing that online now would like to compete in this competition. It should be interesting and Challenging to say the least.