It works as well as it ever did, i.e. in non-adversarial situations. It's not designed to be secure so it fails when people try to game it. Designing something like Page Rank that works in an adversarial environment is still an open problem.
The perfect example of why this is broken is health and medicine, for all its fails, we all know that modern medicine is based on evidence, something all other alternatives are not.
Secondly take news, the actual source the source of truth most of the time is not the first match, and could and is often surpassed by some social media commentator which is just wrong imho.
PR never worked.
Its the same as thinking the stars of music (pick any name) are the best because they are popular even if they cant play an instrument and most never write their own songs.
This would create an intentional bias in the results. That's not something you expect from a web search, it should return the most relevant and popular links not the ones that agree with mainstream science. Wikipedia, PubMed and other databases where actual experts contribute are way better for that.
Do they use page rank?