How does Google prevent gaming of its SERP click-tracking?

Question

Google tracks what links are clicked on search result pages, and probably how many times each is clicked as well. If this data were to be used to influence search results, perhaps by lowering the rank of links that got low click-through rates, how can Google protect it from gaming?

I ask because I'd like to track clicks in a similar way on a web app I'm building, and you have to think about gaming from day one. Would just limiting it to one IP address per click be enough? Is there some other way?

Here's a relevant discussion: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3918680.htm

Answer 1

Seems to me that Google would keep how they go about ranking their Natural search results as secret as possible/practical, to help prevent those things from happening.

But anyways, in general I think for natural search results, Google focuses more on what is actually indexed on the page(s) and not so much what people are clicking on. As in, they crawl your page and try to figure out which content is more relevant to the search word/phrase based on the actual content of the page. So for instance if 2 pages show up in a SERP about dogs... one page just casually mentions dogs in a listing of animals, while the other one is a page dedicated to dogs. It doesn't matter if the first one has 1000 clicks and the 2nd one has 10 clicks, the 2nd one will probably be listed first because it is more specifically relevant to "dogs".

In other words, I'm sure that # of clicks does get factored in on some level, just not very much, and for the little amount that it does, I don't think it's in Google's best interest to divulge how.