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I haven't checked in the last year or so, but when I had the toolbar on a sniffer back then, it was clear that the dialogue between the toolbar and Google was much more extensive than the dialogue offered by all the checker code I've seen on these forums.
For one thing, the checkers don't offer or accept a Google cookie. It's true that someone could have Google cookies blocked on Explorer and the toolbar would most likely behave the same way, but it's also true that blocked cookies are relatively rare. That's a clue right there, if Google is looking for clues.
I think it is fair to say that the PageRank hackers have not made an effort to design their checkers to fly under Google's radar. All they're doing is having fun with reverse engineering and hacking.
Another question is whether the PageRank value is even particularly meaningful these days. It was up until April 2003, but in the last 17 months Google's algorithms have depended less on PageRank, and more on anchor text in the links.
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