[hangphyr]

Youtube has been doing that for a long time now, manually adjusting specific search results, basing it sometimes on geography. I don't know if they are still manually adjusting results in this example, but one example a couple months ago was if someone searched for "Louder with Crowder change my mind" in the US, Crowder's videos were buried several pages in. If you hop onto a VPN and try another country, the expected natural search result came up instead.

One could possibly blame it on poor engineering and bugs, but given Google's talent pool, that seems unlikely.

[shadowgovt]

One hypothetical way that can happen is if Google is prototyping something that impacts search ordering (a lot of their prototyping starts gated US-only because the team working on a feature hasn't done the hard work of l10n for the feature yet).