As someone who works in search this is unsurprising, and happens all the time. Search is a two sided sales exercise both to show you good products and also to products that make the e-commerce business money. Search is the e-commerce businesses sales person - not a neutral broker. You don’t expect the blue shirt at Best Buy to be entirely neutral do you?

It’s actually a pretty understudied microeconomics case

https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2017/07/04/optimizing...