Paraphrasing "There was also found"

Look at this sentence:

There was also found a significant interaction effect between gender and age groups

The part "There was also found" gives about 50 million records when you google it with quotations, but the editor of the journal I submitted my manuscript in, wrote in the review that this sentence "is awkwardly phrased". I have two questions:

1) Is this sentence really awkwardly phrased?

2) What would be a good paraphrasing for the sentence

It is most certainly awkward, at the very least. What you're looking for is We also found X or X was also found but not there. . .

Unfortunately, Google is not the right tool for deciding whether something is correct English or not. Google NGrams, which query a corpus of published works as opposed to random internet musings, while far from perfect, are a much better choice:

As you can see in the image above there are relatively few occurrences of there was also found and essentially none in the latter part of the century. Looking at specific examples from the 1880s, it does indeed seem as though the form was used at the time. However, today it is virtually non-existent.

So, yes, your journal's editor is quite right, that is an awkward phrase and you should change it to X was also found or simply, there was also X dropping the found altogether,