What you refer to is nothing more than quality control. What the original article suggested was that people are hired for the sole purpose of manually arranging search results. Now, I hope I don’t have to explain how impossible of a task this would be – there are zillions of important searches, from cars, airfare, insurance, Britney Spears, etc 
Add to this the customized results and hand-picked results are close to impossible.
And I don’t see anything wrong with G hiring people to evaluate the quality of their results, at the end, this is how they adjust their algo. Also keep in mind that the Algo is designed by humans and will operate on what those humans believe it’s a quality result.
Bottom line – there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Google manually arranges its results.