PatrickDeese - 5:18 pm on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

> that it really ends up being up to the rater and his/her interpretation of the guide

But that's the trick - it is never up to *one* rater. As you can see on the "deep throat" site, there are multiple raters for SERPs - and that they can even see what another rater thought about the site.

This is helpful in two ways. If you see adsense and immediately rate the site as "offensive", and 5 other raters have voted "useful", (I assume, from the graph) you could return to re-review the site/serp and make a revised decision. Also, I am sure that in borderline cases, seeing 4 useful votes or whatever is probably going to make someone lean towards voting the same way, unless they spot some unsavory aspect that no one else noticed.

To be frank, I think that the Google spam guidelines are pretty fair and open minded - I wish that DMOZ's guidelines were as fair :p