[mikece]

Considering that Google is a direct competitor with Tuta in the context of email I don't see how this isn't illegal, anti-competitive behavior. Google would be stupid to blame this on their algo because that has second order consequences which would cost them more than paying a settlement to Tuta and knocking this nonsense off.

[StressedDev]

What do you mean by "second order consequences?" Also, what if this is caused by a bug in Google's search engine? Would that also be illegal? Is it anti-competitive if Google made a mistake?

[mikece]

Would Google really admit there was a bug in their search engine? Paid search results is what makes Google the most money. Admitting they can't deliver bug-free results causes people to lose confidence and decide to advertise elsewhere.

[lxgr]

Is that so? How would Google search users even learn that Google search "is buggy"?

And unless search users stop using Google, advertisers have no incentive to stop advertising there.

[shadowgovt]

I'd be willing to entertain a conspiracy theory if searches like "alternatives to GMail" didn't still work (and show Tuta front-and-center).

This is misconfig, either on Tuta's part or Google's (Google's search result infrastructure is distributed and sometimes a cluster just plain goes down without enough replicas to maintain the search hierarchy integrity; that isn't considered a P0 failure because users still get results back, just not the results they usually get).