Yeah, I've seen people try to say this was because the US is just to racist and misogynist to elect a black woman... and maybe we are, but I don't think we got the chance to actually learn that. If there was a campaign, most people never saw it. I'm a dirty pathetic politics watcher, and all I saw was "We're not gonna do anything different from what we're already doing" A lot of people I talked to in real life weren't aware this was an election year, and they definitely weren't aware Biden wasn't running again.
this google search trends stuff is the laziest commentary ever. It's tea leaf reading level political analysis. Google Trends is not a reliable source of information.
back when Alta vista was the best search engine, it had this cool/funny feature where you could look at a random collection of what was being searched right then. I would show my friends and we would laugh so hard at some of them, especially repeated searches because they told a story of someone desperate for more info.
Yeah you're right. Furthermore, the graph that they show for "Did Joe Biden drop out" isn't even in absolute units, so we can't actually tell how many people are making this query. They normalize it so that the maximum is always represented by 100, but that still might only be like <1000 people.