[shadowprofile77]

Seeing as how some of these comments about their search results claimed the Google widget dominated while others said that competitor results were plainly in top spot, it seems that Google selectively does both one and the other for the sake of plausible deniability while also giving itself a certain discreet edge for Google products in its own supposedly unbiased search system.

[username90]

A factor to consider is that Google Search is a mess internally, I worked there. There isn't a regexp deciding whether to show a widget or not, they use machine learning for that. Likely it considers something else it knows about you to decide whether to show it or not. There are so many data-scientists creating models based on outputs from each others models that I would be surprised if there aren't a lot of strange subtle interactions going on.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

Not defending Google. I want to see them broken up, but let's not get needlessly conspiratorial.

Google could be running an ab test.

Google could also have some algorithm that decides which widgets to show where and to which users.

Just like some days I get 37 captchas before I see my Google search result,and other days I can make hundreds of searches without a single captcha.