Using an anonymous source to confirm my story seems a complicated way to report on this topic. Google confirmed it already yesterday – see Debbie Frost’s quote on my site.

The quote "Raters working for Google have no influence on PageRank” is not an issue at all on Search Bistro. The story on my blog doesn’t mention PR once – or the effect that raters could have on it. So what’s the point mentioning it here?

The quote "The source participating in the program told me the leak could have been from someone upset his temporary assignment ended too early." is untrue. I already told some newspapers that one of my students showed me eval.google. He ended his work voluntary.

The screenshots are from end of 2004 and March 2005.

I agree that most raters don't have a clue what happens with their work.

I’ll wrap up my story about Google’s Lab with one more entry with a lot of extra information.

I reported on your site's revelation before in a previous post, so why does this seem complicated?
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-06-02-n43.html

Why did my source emphasizes PageRank is not changed by raters? I suppose because this was discussed as an issue in the trackbacks posted on your article. Someone there said "I've long believed that Google's ranking of responses to search rankings--the famous PageRank algorithm, now with more than 100 variables--is manipulated by human editors working for Google under an algorithmic facade."
http://www.searchbistro.com/index.php?/archives/19-Google-Secret-Lab,-Prelude.html

As far as your source being from someone who was upset, so that may not be true – as I stated in my post, my source only assumed it could have been the case.

Well, I'm sure you didn't mean to cause all the strange accusations now being made against Google – along the lines of "they always lied, the results are changed by humans". Possibly, it was the way you presented the news... as one of Google's "best kept secrets." (After all, they were posting job offers for quality raters.) And possibly, it was because Google itself always likes to emphasize everything's automated. Like here:
http://www.google.com/explanation.html

Now that the cat's out of the bag, Google probably needs to redefine how they present this issue to the public – which sounds like a good thing. Being a programmer I know "it's automated" would be a very bad excuse if one of my programs screws up at work... it'll always be humans who are responsible for the algorithms.

Posted two updates today. One is about Google's CommQuest – the mediator for raters when they disagree with each other and Google's full guidelines of random-query evaluation. Will publish at least two more entries: Google's spam policy and something about EWOQ, a rating system of Google

Only a fraction of the 8.058.044.651 URL's of Google are rated. What are the criteria for rating a source? I discovered no solid criteria yet. (So now and then hundreds of sources are scheduled to be rated, but the international agents don't have time to review them – they URL's just vanish and are replaced by new ones).