That paper is talking about user recommendations, not ranking. Your family member was without a doubt talking about Google News even if they weren't aware of i

That paper is talking about user recommendations, not ranking. Your family member was without a doubt talking about Google News even if they weren't aware of it because results from News are mixed in to generic search results. If you search [trump] on web search then the top part of the page is dedicated entirely to results that come from News, not generic web search. The idea that Google News is unbiased is unsustainable, simply because humans whitelist news sources. It's not like web search where basically any web page can appear at any location automatically. There is no algorithm for deciding if a website is "news" or not. It's a human judgement. Google employees have literally cried in company meetings when Trump was elected, only someone very naive would believe these people are going to be neutral about what sources they allow and how they decide which sources are more authoritative than others. Do you believe it's a coincidence that Breitbart never ranks, despite having an Alexa rank essentially the same as the Washington Post, given how Google employees are reported to have acted lately? Your knowledge of maths is I'm afraid not very relevant to this topic because mathematics is simply a tool. Your family member is evaluating humans and their likely actions, not algorithms, and that is the correct thing to do because it's ultimately humans that control the algorithms. Google employees are perfectly capable of biasing its results and then lying about it to the public, without even being aware that they're doing it.