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Showing posts from August, 2014

Healthgrades manipulating star ratings so that physicians don't turn against them?

I did a random vanity search on Google today, searching for "alex mohseni", and noticed something unusual in the search results: I knew that, in fact, I had a "4/5" rating on Healthgrades, *not* a "5/5" rating as it was showing me. I'll explain the absurdity of these sort of random online scoring systems for physicians on another post. For now, I was curious to know why the stars were showing 5/5, instead of 4/5. I clicked on the link, and sure enough, my aggregate score was 4/5, not 5/5. I then noticed that I had done my search while logged in to Google. I logged out of Google and performed the same exact search, and here's what the Healthgrades result looked like: Note that there are now 4/5 stars, not 5/5 stars, the only difference being that I signed out of Google. So, Healthgrades (or Google?) was actively manipulating the stars to look very favorable when it knew that a physician was looking him/herself up.  Why would Healthgrade