That's different though. The algorithm applies to all sites, and if apple.com does the same thing a spam-site does, they will be punished by the algorithm as well. Hand picking is very different, in that similar things aren't treated similarly.

> in this case, some better sites resemble spam enough that they were also hit. a basic false positive, collateral damage.

I believe that as well, though not necessarily because of "spam", but because of the topic. I was just trying to explain how people might think that Google doesn't manually curate their results.