If you pull back all the layers of this onion you will most likely find out its just humans manipulating a situation to fund secret projects and funnel money into private corporations. It happens elsewhere as well but mostly under other different veils.
The search engine makes the rules for what they deem important in finding the correct results. SEO is the practice of optimising of a web site to best get your site on the top of the list. All the painful stories about grandmothers and long lost lovers at the top of recipes are to achieve better SEO and a good example of how SEO made the internet worse.