I won't lie and say I did an in depth review of the top results...I just scanned them quickly looking for any consistencies in BL's, # of pages, PR, etc in relation to placement. I noticed a lot of inconsistencies in all of the above, but nothing that allowed me to say "here's why these sites are being displayed in the order that they are".
Maybe this will give you some more inside on how it works. How Newsknife calculates the relevance order of each Google News Listing