Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The initial idea, StoryRank—related to Google's PageRank formula—was developed by Krishna Bharat in 2001, the Principal Research Scientist of Google. No human is involved in the altering of the front page or story promotion, beyond tweaking the aggregation algorithm. Google News left beta in January 2006.

Technical specifications

Introduced as a beta release in April 2002, the Google News service came out of beta on 23 January 2006. Different versions of the aggregator are available for more than 40 regions in 19 languages (as of 31 July 2008), with continuing development ongoing. Currently, service in the following languages is offered: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (traditional and simplified characters), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Norwegian, Czech, Swedish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Tamil, Turkish, Polish and Malayalam.

The service covers news articles appearing within the past 30 days on various news websites. For the English language it covers about 4,500 sitesFact: date=October 2007; for other languages, less. Its front page provides roughly the first 200 characters of the article and a link to its larger content. Websites may or may not require a subscription; sites requiring subscription are noted in the article description.Fact: date=October 2007 Some online projects 1 provide continuous multi-document summarization of stories originally clustered by the Google News.

Article selection

In March 2005 attention was called to Google's inclusion of the white supremacist National Vanguard magazine, and the resulting controversy forced Google News to remove the site from its service. In another case, Google was criticized for not including sources which are censored in China. On September 27, 2004, on the official Google Blog, the Google Team wrote: "For users inside the People's Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country." Google now places specific IP addresses from China on a blacklist and prevents them from being indexed.Fact: date=October 2007

News agencies

In March 2005, Agence France Presse (AFP) sued Google for $17.5 million, alleging that Google News infringed on its copyright because "Google includes AFP's photos, stories and news headlines on Google News without permission from Agence France Presse."2 3 It was also alleged that Google ignored a cease and desist order, though Google counters that it has opt-out procedures which AFP could have followed but did not. Google now hosts Agence France-Presse news, as well as the Associated Press, Press Association and the Canadian Press. This arrangement started in August of 2007.In 2007 Google announced it was paying for Associated Press content displayed in Google News. It is not clear if the Associated Press articles are retained in the archive, or are only available for a limited time.