Seen Louis Rossman talk about this thread in his latest video this morning. Wanted to chime in.
I have stopped using Godaddy for a while now because I had suspected that was happening. I wasn't 100% sure, but when I would spend hours looking for a domain name and searching through hundreds of names, I noticed a few of them with the least amount of characters and words they might consider more "premium" were taken. The few I noticed were some of the top choices I was considering using.
I do suspect they have some sort of algorithm where they take domains you might consider buying, but I can't prove it.
I've stopped searching on there for a while now and just stick with Namecheap. Never have any problems with Namecheap and their customer service was pretty good/fast when I got locked out of my account 1 time.
Now days I'm pretty paranoid about searching for domains on any domain site...
Also Louis Rossman mentioned you in his latest video. That's what brought me here.
https://youtu.be/i05uGLFZe2Y