>seems to have a feedback loop

How is that different counting quarters in the newspaper machines? Or copies sold?

Physical spaces are much more limited real-estate wise, whereas Google has as much space as they do page loads. Surely with so many consumers and producers, a much higher breadth of news can be exposed than is currently.

No they don't.

The fundamental challenge in search is that you have two limited resources: display place and user attention span. Google won vs other search engines because they were better at figuring out what users were looking for and putting it higher in the listings.

Anyone arguing the reverse - that Google is driving opinion, not the other way around - is saying that they're massively sabotaging their core feature yet no competitor has been able to exploit this.

Fox News obviously has a large TV audience, but I'd be curious how that demographic maps to google usage. And it's worth remembering that it's not a "fox news vs cnn" comparison vs a "fox news vs the sum of the less-right-wing channels" comparison.

Why can't it be both? Google won because they were the best, yes. But there's always the possibility of feedback loops. Just look at YouTube - discovery on there of smaller channels has become almost impossible, with bigger channels being reinforced constantly. Granted, video is much harder to understand and surface to users than news. Surely there should be enough content that it's more than a tiny minority which succeeds?

Every major platform is struggling with this.

> Surely there should be enough content that it's more than a tiny minority which succeeds?

Isn't this what has always happened historically with any new media platform, from print to radio to online? Storage space got cheaper, but human attention remains limited, so popularity and feedback loops are a human problem, not a technical one.