I just searched for "russia today" on DDG and rt.com did NOT show up on the first page, instead the page has: aljazeera, dailymail, cnn, bbc, reuters, themoscotimes, wikipedia, cnbc, npr, and yahoo. And this is from California (Orange County).
You get lots of spammy stuff (top link is a site offering to sell a translation of RT), site-ranking sites (that rank RT), some rando lady quoting RT's meta description on Twitter (!!!), and even RT's pages on Twitter, Linkedin. And then it's finally there, just before getting into really high quality results like a page on rotten tomatoes ranking the 200 Best LGBTQ+ Movies of All Time.
"Curating" results is a great way to completely break your own search engine.
If I was designing a search engine, I wouldn't use keywords in meta tags for ranking. It's too vulnerable to keyword stuffing attacks.