Google's John Mueller said that Google has very different people in the corporation who are responsible for reviewing search algorithms from those who review user reports of spam and feedback. Both are humans but those humans do not impact the search results directly, they just provide feedback on those results.
Here is John's tweet on this topic:
I don't have an overview of all the kinds of folks involved, but generally speaking, those who review potential algorithm changes do very different work (different skills, etc) than those who review user reports, for example.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) June 15, 2020
In fact, Google recently said spam reports are not going to be used for manual actions - only for making its search spam prevention algorithms better.
Then when it comes to algorithm reviews, Google has those human quality raters who are not even Googlers, Google has their own internal departments that code them, then do assessments on them manually and also in live experiments and so much more. So yes, a lot of humans work at Google but to improve the algorithms overall.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
