As detailed on the site css-tricks.com, a popular HN item, there was a time before "#1 google Organic search result" meant anything. That is, the best search engine at the time did not try to order the results. The search was accurate and comprehensive but there was no preferential ordering according to "popularity" or a "secret" algorithm. That search engine was Alta Vista. Raw results.

I can remember combing through page after page looking for the results I wanted. Try that today and Google is likely to temporarily block you, accusing you of having "strange activity" coming from your computer, or looking like a "bot".

The more Google has tried to "solve" the problem of finding the appropriate results for the particular searcher within the raw results returned from the query, the more they have manipulated the raw results to suit their own perspective. There is no option to get those raw results and search within them the way you want. There is only Google's way -- reorder them according to Google's "secret" processes. Do not dig into subsequent pages, stay on page one. This necessarily carries a Google bias. It also creates a "winner-take-all" contest to reach page one that Google's exploits for selling online ad services.

In other words, not only does Google manipulate searches through deciding the "1st search result", it actually created this concept of "1st search result" with respect to web search. The idea that Google could guess the "correct" search result, reorder the raw results and place the "best" one at the top of the first page of results was in fact Google's idea.

Thanks to Google, reordering the raw results has become commonplace so no one really thinks about this anymore, but it is this (biased) reordering that allows Google to profit.