[lupire]

Google chooses to rank "authoritative" sites based on its own notion of authoritativity (which they don't share, but they decide).

They implement it as agnostic tuning as much as possible, avoiding single human chery picking sites. They use panels of humans (mturk style) for quality ratings.

Could you imagine the outrage if Google said "The government is always the best source about everything?"

What even would be the point? Use the government search engine for that use case.