Yes, Google Does De-List Pages; But When?

Google really should publicly explain their stance on this - their (and other search engines') role in the internet is just far too important for it to be left to some internal policy.

I would advocate some form of regulation of this type of thing - but the chances of us ending up with something worse than the status quo is probably a bit high.

I can't believe they are capable of manually inserting a disclaimer for Michelle Monkey, but not of manually lowering the rank of Michelle Monkey. (if(!"monkey" in keywords) {results["monkey"]["rank"] -= 100})

When the website has too high a ratio of content to keywords. I know this from IM.

When it considers them spammy, MFA & Co or finds them cloaking. (Didn't check the link ;))

This case is discussed in the article (which you did not read, but commented on anyway).

"Google has actually removed pages from their search results - not because the pages were illegal or because the webmasters were search engine spamming, but because of the page's "offensive" content."