(72nd) Open Source Search Engine vs. Search Engine Conspiracy

Microsoft has launched Bing and then we have Google, Yahoo and about dozen other relevant or not so relevant search engines. Which is actually great, when you want to find something. Now, my tiny little paranoid brain twists and turns (after seeing the Bing-marketing video, actually) around one question.

How much these search engines can manipulate the information we will find on the web? Is it as much or even more than we get out from the news companies? I'm a 'bit' skeptic with them at the moment. Since their funding is anyhow based on the money they make on getting the search results to hit the correct marketing, how independent can the search results ever be?

But furthermore, while I keep being mistrustful towards these nowadays corporate giants, I wonder if there is an alternative solution for this? Meaning that is there an open source search engine which could actually be as accurrate as the others but without anything commercial in it, just pure information? Like wikipedia, but with the information on the whole web. Could it for example use cloud computing or similar system to hold on indexing and to index itself. Thinking about SETI@Home -type of system, which could then become like WEB@Home -search engine. And that it would be completely independent on any power structures and funding and made by volunteers with open source ethics. Edit: Something found from here http://www.searchtools.com/tools/tools-opensource.html

Now, I don't have any prove about the results manipulation with Google, Microsoft or Yahoo, or any of the others, but it would certainly make sense to THEM (They talk a lot, don't they -Pulp Fiction) to manipulate the results in a transparent and unnoticeable way. The companies I talk about in here are at the moment the most powerful global organizations in the whole world and they hold the most of the information the people in the world can access.

Well in the other hand, how much this information we can find actually has anything to do with the real life then?