Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a

Google was designed to prioritize popularity from the very beginning: that's what their original PageRank algorithm did. Their algorithm has no way of knowing a concept like "accurate". If almost all of the links on a given topic go to BlatantlyWrong.com, and when everyone clicks on the BlatantlyWrong.com link and not the AccurateButBoring.org result that is #2 on the page, the users will reinforce the wrong answer.