hutcheson - 4:12 pm on Apr 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

>I guess the distinction Google would make is between penalizing a site for some kind of real or perceived manipulation (which they do)

But, and this is the important bit, NOT BY HAND.

They remove sites by hand -- they have to be able to do that, and they promise to do it for specific kinds of SE-perverting.

But they don't adjust page rank or page relevance or page result order by hand. Ever.

No, removing one site will affect the PR of others. I presume they mean they don't remove one site to tweak others.

What they do by hand is constantly tweak the parameters to make what they consider the best sites to come up. They have to use specific test categories to evaluate their parameter adjustments. And the net effect is almost the same as if they were hand-tweaking the results IN THOSE CATEGORIES. But their purpose is to come up with parameter values that work across the board (or at least, across the entire bucket of similar search queries -- many people are arguing that there are at least two buckets now.)