Agreed, but the end result is that their algorithm pre-fix was clearly faulty and should be considered a mistake. Their gymnastics to the contrary just come across as either a bad-faith argument or self-delusion.
What comes across as cherry-picking to me is pointing out a single random inconsequential web search and the result it used to have in a previous year.
Not a single search, but many searches done repeatedly over time, proving the result is highly unlikely to be happenstance. Oh, and the results only happened to changed after Spotify launched an official complaint. The WSJ article the NYT links to is even more detailed.
