If this only happened once it may be a coincidence.

If you did in any way visit another page with this term then it is still possible for Google to embed trackers in pages and use your IP and fingerprinting techniques to gather data and use it for recommendations. Note that using a VPN and cromite does not prevent all means of fingerprinting. But if you did not visit any pages other than the search engine then either that privacy-focused search engine is sharing your searches with Google or it was a coincidence.

The “researchers” in no way demonstrate that “AI” replaced any of the jobs lost. They don’t even raise the question of whether “AI” is used to discipline labor despite not being much of a productivity aid.