What you say makes a lot of sense but a court ruled that Google's search ranks were self-promoting. I guess a good question here would be whether there were similar algorithms to funnel people towards E-Bay or other competitors' shopping services if they were likely looking for those.
But this is really a digression. The point is that search rank does promote. We can come up with many cases where Google perhaps shouldn't display the most relevant results. The question is whether Google should use their near-monopoly to influence the world via search results according to their moral code instead of strict legal responsibility.
A court is a third party that is more objective than a Google employee. That is why I mentioned it.
Google is a great service (that I love and use daily by choice) but they also spend a lot of money to make sure they are the default search provider. They have more means than smaller search companies and they use those means to achieve almost total market share. Then Google used their vast market share to skew business in their favor. That is almost the textbook definition of monopolistic behavior.
Google was literally funneling people to its own services via its search results and had no similar linking for other services. The court's decision seemed reasonable.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-e...
But this is really a digression. The point is that search rank does promote. We can come up with many cases where Google perhaps shouldn't display the most relevant results. The question is whether Google should use their near-monopoly to influence the world via search results according to their moral code instead of strict legal responsibility.