It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink

It is a conflation, but I argue that there's no bright line between the two. The ideology behind pagerank is that relevant results are better and that backlink popularity measures relevance. Another sorting objective is that "more engaging results" are better. Each is ultimately an expression of will, since there is no objective ranking of what makes something relevant or engaging. Everyone will agree on the order of names in a phone book, but nobody will agree on the "relevance" order of search results. You see this every day in news-adjacent search topics, where popularity, relevance, and factual correctness can all give different "proper" orderings. Ultimately, people dislike stances that give disagreeable results, but they think benign stances to be invisible. I don't believe a coherent, legal argument can work this way.