With out reading the intervening 16 pages of comments that were made between when the thread was created and when I found it, I see that the OP says that he isn't sure if Google does manual checks or not. I can't verify they do, but they publish that they do. They state on their Google --> Inside Search --> Fighting Spam page "Every day, millions of useless spam pages are created. We fight spam through a combination of computer algorithms and manual review." I don't want to put everything on the page here that they post, but it is an interesting read.