I can answer this. (And by "you", I mean the article writer. I understand the OP here on Lemmy did not write this.)
Google started out as a search engine, but they've always been an information broker. They would index the web and make it make sense to you, while collecting information on what you search for to sell it to advertisers. Well, not just you, but groups of people.
Then Google got into email (2004, six years after their founding), and they found they could get a ton more information by scanning your email. Sure, they anonymised it, but they were becoming less of a search company and more of an information broker and advertiser.
With Android, they didn't need you to check your email, they could track everything.
So now, with AI, going back to their original model, they don't need to redirect you to the web pages that have the information you're looking for, in this case the basis for a basketball meme. They want to have their chatbot do the search, jump through the hoops, navigate around the ads, and present you the information. The problem is, your search looked problematic to Google. Google knows if you're a grown man or a middle school boy looking up pictures of naked preteen girls. For the schoolboy, it's innocent, he just wants to see girls like his classmates naked. For the adult, it's a whole other ballgame. This is an extreme example, but it's a way Google has been shaping search in an attempt to be reasonably ethical. For the adult, they will hide results and possibly notify the authorities. But if they think a kid made that search, they'll explain how naked pictures of girls can be harmful.
That's what Google did here. It thought you were lamenting being dumped by this guy and it tried to help. It found the meme, and it erred on the side of caution. It's not entirely a bad thing. But it's not something a lot of us older, wisened Internet sages want. So we either use Google and ignore the AI bit. Some have a shortcut that disables it. I use DuckDuckGo. You can disable the AI there, but I leave it on. It can be useful. When it's not, I scroll past it to the results. I like DDG for a number of reasons, but a good one is that they let you block YouTube ads on iOS for free. It can generally be done but not for free, and DDG did it for free. That took some bravery, when others were trying to profit from users of a phone who generally rejected the alternative that tracks everything you do.
If you don't like DDG (because they use AI at all, because they use Microsoft Bing for search, because of something else), there are other, more ethical search engines. There's Kagi, which is interesting because it isn't free. It's a paid search engine that claims by charging you, you are not the product. It's the business model of Google, reversed. Rather than charging advertisers for access to you, they charge you for access to their services. That's a popular one and one everyone should at least be aware of. Another free one people like is Ecosia, which plants trees with the money it makes from your searches, or something like that.
But in short, Google has always been weird. We just like them because they make cool stuff.