Ranking in the search engines is definitely heavily manipulated. Search Engine Optimisation has been part of my job for a few years, so I know quite a bit about how they work. There are two main points that I have time to make on this:

• There is a specific program in place whereby 'trusted' websites are given a piece of code to embed in their sites which the search engines pick up and they then give those sites a priority boost in the ranks. This has the effect of meaning that the mainstream news corporations and similar sites will always rank more highly than other sites. This is part of why you are seeing the repeating stories/pages/text - exactly the same as the way videos have emerged from the US whereby hundreds of news shows all use the same phrases and script to describe the same story, despite being 'independent' of each other.
• Optimisation for websites to ensure they dominate the search engines is largely a resources war, since the more high quality links a webpage has pointing to it, the higher up the results listings it will get. This means that the more time you have to network with sites and to get other sites linking to your site, the higher your site will rank. Inevitably, this means that whoever has the most resources can dominate search results, similar to how 'proof of brain' on hive is sometimes more accurately described as 'proof of wallet'. This all means that it is possible for groups to dominate search engines even without colluding directly with the search engine operators. However, I have no doubt that the search engine operators are also in collusion to achieve full spectrum information domination across the planet - at least in most cases.