7_Driver - 9:53 am on Jun 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

that made it sound like people were reaching in via this console to tweak results directly, which just isn't true at all.

If I understand GG correctly - what he's saying here is that the ratings aren't used directly to drop sites from the index, just to provide data on human evaluations with which to tune the algo.

That makes perfect sense - and I genuinely don't doubt GG for a moment.

I'm a bit confused about the term "whitelist" in the document though. I guess this could simply mean - "here's an example of a site which humans like" - and the site then takes it's chances in the algo tweaking like any other.

But the term "whitelist" SEEMS to imply "hands off this (human evaluated) site". ie manually exempting it from any "anti spam" penalties in the algo tweak.

Of course since this document was never intended for public release, it's likely nobody ever went through it checking that none of the words implied anything incorrect(!).

Still - given that I understand from GGs statement above that sites are not being penalised manually in this process, it would be interesting to know if "whitelisted" in this context is a hint to the algo tuners, or an exemption from spam penalty.