If you are the Google corporation how do you search for information? You don't just look it up anymore in a search engine. At that point you have to wonder, when you are google what is your relationship to information? Throttling info? Obfuscation? You have to be a lot of things to a lot of people, but you do things mostly for advertisers.

You think about it a little. They get to hire the cream of the crop since their product isn't a thing that gets sold. Its maybe influence? They make money but they don't make things and thats a profitable place to be.

Here is the 5 year graph for Jordan Peterson. It picks up on September of 2016: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=Jordan%20peterson

My guess is that there was a ton of advertising money being spent in the lead up to the election since the outcome involved magnitudes more money. One local company, wont mention their name since it doesn't matter: they lost 200 million from market uncertainty. Thats actual measurable loss they cannot regain. They're not the only ones in this boat either. By September they threw in the towel since they realized they would lose the election and Peterson was their coping strategy. The way their thinking worked as far as I can tell is that they had someone at google come up with the name of a professor any employee knew who had done work in antifascism studies. Someone probably took his classes and recommended him. They then tweaked the youtube algorithm to show his videos to anyone whose browser cookies showed visits to 4chan or similar sites to attempt to 'detox' people away from the right. Since they always overestimate their own influence it didn't work and Peterson himself didn't understand where the (free) publicity he was getting was coming from. He tried to cobble together a book.