More likely it’s just how Google’s search algorithms work.
When they report 170k they try to exclude duplicate results, the same page with different URLs or maybe just straight copies of pages that viewers aren’t interested in.
The number probably went down once their backend processes went over the results in more detailed and cleaned up the result set.
It could also be some of the mentions were temporary topical content that changed as the story got older.
I think that’s a lot more likely than someone silently censoring 20k different pages.
