I fail to understand how this is not manipulating search results by hand. If something other than Google's ranking algorithm notices something (i.e. in this case it's the web spam team, Danny Sullivan, or just the web community as a whole) and, as a result, Google decides to manually run an "algorithm" to "fix" it, that is most definitely human intervention and therefore manipulating search results by hand as far as I'm concerned. - Tony Ruscoe

Tony, I think the answer is that we stand by whatever the detection algorithm outputs and we don't modify the algorithm's output. We could make this detection algorithm run daily, but it would really be a waste of lots of processing for a topic that's already a bit of a tempest in a teapot. See also my comment at http://bit.ly/186dp for more info about where the algorithm didn't work well for [failure] in December 2008 but we didn't change things manually. - Matt Cutts