I agree. And what are the implications? Wasn't Google sued by people unhappy with their rankings (Howard Stern?) and wasn't Google's defense that their algorithm was unbiased? (Not a rhetorical question, I never followed how that played out.) Once you introduce human reviewers, you're going to have more unhappy businesses. I'd rather a SEO spammer push me down (nothing personal) than know an actual Googler secretly decided my website wasn't good enough--a personal bias against me in particular. Who are the reviewers, what do we know about them, what are they looking for, not looking for, have they reviewed you personally, etc. I think Google may call it a "manual action" in Webmaster Tools, an ambiguous way of saying somebody at Google manipulated the algorithm against you. Do they have different levels of manual actions? Are manual actions always disclosed?