ReSiever - 5:56 pm on Sep 22, 2008 (gmt 0)

I agree, the patent partly describes what is going on with their 'investigators'.

You are right about the two types of evaluation, tedster. They do have their teams across the world, and the individual Google engineers. From what i have been seeing in our logfiles, the evaluators not only come from Google IP's, but I also see other, non-Google-IP adresses from which the evaluators do their thing. Their useragents are diverse, and, for what i can see, only a few of them have the right to 'pull the trigger' and finally flag your webpage, or entire site. And when they flag it to be spam, i certainly believe that Google Engineers will then come by and pay your site a visit to see what they can do to improve their algorithm.