It's not much of a coincidence that the bug manifests at a time when there is considerable internet activity around Winston Churchill when Google's system autom

It's not much of a coincidence that the bug manifests at a time when there is considerable internet activity around Winston Churchill when Google's system automatically chooses photographs to display based on an effectively black boxed algorithm. It does not seem far fetched that the activity may have caused the algorithm to change the result to use an image that has some kind of error, for example. Your "simplest explanation" is a wild leap.