tedster - 3:49 pm on Sep 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

It strikes me that there are two different types of human evaluation. One, which this thread focuses on, involves a TEAM of evaluators looking at a set of results for a given query. It takes consensus across the independent members of this team to move a ranking up or down - and up is always possible. I'm also not sure that members of the Evaluator Army would be visiting from a Google IP address. Maybe, but this is a globally located bunch of folks.

There can also be a manual visit from an engineer on Google's search quality team - rather than the human editorial army. They would be checking on something that was flagged for inspection by any number of means - algorithmic, competitor reports, and so on.

This search quality engineer has a lot more clout and might be able to instigate some action as an individual, subject to a supervisor's approval of course.

What I weant to emphasize is that the "patented" human editorial input approach is not the only cause of a manual inspection visit showing up in your server logs.