indyank - 9:34 am on Jul 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

All of these winners are small to tiny traffic sites.

There is the clue.They haven't been pandalized and there isn't any quality score for them.In other words, they would be having the perfect quality score.

Did they escape the radar? Why did they escape? Is it because they were too small to get noticed by the algo?

This is run separately from the normal algo and not all sites are pulled into this. If you have a page for a reasonably popular keyword (top 12% of keywords or something beyond that now?), then your entire site gets pulled into this evaluation.