Guess it depends on the "algorithm" but if we were still in the PageRank era there's no way in hell ADL or SLPC would be anywhere near the top results for "Alex Jones", considering how many other news stories, blogs, comments, etc. about him exist.
The PageRank era ended almost immediately. Google has had a large editorial team for a long, long time (probably before they were profitable).
It turns out PageRank aways kind of sucked. However, it was competing with sites that did “pay for placement” for the first page or two, so it only had to be better than “maliciously bad”.
