"I have spent decades looking for examples of Google putting its enormous thumb on the scale to censor or amplify certain results, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better.”
Absolutely bonkers. The Google antitrust trial discovered that Google is actually *changing user queries* in order to generate results that give more sponsored ads
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/