@KimSJ it’s obvious that you just want to believe what you already believe and aren’t even willing to entertain a possible alternative explanation.

I don’t have time for that. Bye.

@KimSJ Personally, Kim, I think you sound like a conspiracy theorist. Trying out a bunch of search completions, I think the easy explanation here is that DDG more heavily weights recent queries in autocomplete. If you use Google Trends to compare "trump executive orders" vs "trump epstein" over the last year, the former has a much bigger interest peak.

I doubt whatever either company is up to is nearly that simple, of course; I'd expect the ranking algorithms to be very complex and, for competitive reasons, pretty secret. To assert that there's only one possible explanation based on one data point here strikes me as some very confident ignorance.

Cc: @aesthr

@KimSJ You mean the 7th? I could make up a dozen explanations for that. I have no insider knowledge, but just given Google's general approach and given that this is a super important interface, I am sure that this is a very complicated system driven by a ton of historical data, especially data on what people actually pick from lists. The "why" for systems of that scale is always, "it produces the right metrics across millions of use cases". Deciding on one explanation because it gives you the feels is conspiracist thinking.

I mean, go ahead and believe what you want, but maybe consider what happens when you start down that road like the Q/MAGA people did.