Can you provide more examples of this?
On the other hand, the top Google results go to The Guardian, Wikipedia, Time, the BBC, etc., discussing the topic -- hugely popular sites.
Google's meant to find popular relevant pages for your search terms. Remember, that's what PageRank was all about. So seems to be working as expected.
Personally, I have yet to see any “credible” news source and the adage remains that every news article about anything I have even the most minor inside knowledge of seems completely inaccurate, especially the politically laden ones.
No matter what mechanism Google uses to assign such ranking: be it their own judgement or simply an agnostic a.i. that lets the masses decide, I cannot see anything good coming from it and there will always be a bias not based in factuality, but politics.
...that it's incentivized to return the results that the most people are looking for? As measured by clicks?
If you don't believe the news and you don't find popularity useful either then I honestly can't imagine what you're even looking for then.
Well, Google isn't omnipotent and thus it only echos back results which are popular with people, which is basically politics, so yes. If everyone tomorrow instantly started thinking the world was flat (and previous flat earthers start saying the world is round) Google's results would shift pretty dramatically to whatever is the most popular side.
Google returns a list of left leaning sources down playing it, DDG returns a list of right leaning sources condemning it.
The results are night and day different.
Also your username gave me a chuckle