With its Search products Google is already shaping the Western World views and culture in subtle ways not everybody's noticing. In doing that, almost always in a purely algorithmic way without human intervention, the "evil" threshold has been passed many times. Again, without anyone really noticing.
In other words, it was an old motto already.
It is always with human intervention - whoever controls the ranking algorithm controls the display results. That's power of Google. Simple change of ranking algorithm can drop some website's traffic by 80%-90% for good or bad.
It is with human intervention, so please consider it far more evil.
Each individual search is of course determined algorithmically, but the criteria for relevance that the algorithm applies are chosen by Google employees.
