I disagree: the point of the original Pagerank algorithm was its bias. In particular, its use of link weights gave the algorithm a strong bias for (a proxy for) relevance.

An "unbiased" search algorithm would need to return results based on simple criteria, readily explained and presented to the searcher, such as "date first crawled" or "number of keyword appearances."

Please attempt a simple implementation with the methods you describe and see how it performs over even a non trivial amount of data and you will see the difference in results.

And I'm not even considering malicious results gaming the whole system.

I disagree. If anything, I think I give this research more credit, because I appreciate it as imposing a normative view on what makes search results "good."

This is more than just "how do we sort a list containing billions of keys" or "how do we grab data from a distributed database;" it's also "how do we understand relevance or quality based on machine-interpretable signals?" The latter is a judgment call.

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.

I think the essential disagreement isn’t so much about the choice of bias as it is about the exercise of power, specifically on who’s behalf do you exercise power? Do you do it for your users or for the greater good? Or for your customers? Or maybe your investors? Or maybe your ideals?