"Google News Creator Watches Portal Quiet Critics With 'Best News' Webby"
Online Journalism Review, Staci D. Kramer, September 25, 2003
Cached version

I stumbled upon this article from September 2003. In it, Google News creator Krishna Bharat shares his memories of how his creation came into being. Apparently, it was created in response to the avalanche of news reports after 9/11, in an effort to classify and organize the information flow. He also feels that in a world of turmoil, Google News might be democracy's saving grace. The free flow of information is, indeed, one of many necessary safety valves in a democracy.

However well intended Bharat's ideals may be, his employer already has a checkered past in the realm of censorship, surveillance and reckless disregard for privacy, to put it diplomatically. At one time, Mr. Bharat claims that "this is code that is set down and is on the public record." I don't quite understand this claim, and I don't think Google ever released the code for Google News to the public, let alone by 2003.

I've excerpted a few passages, read the full article at the source link. Emphasis in excerpts mine.

Excerpts

The 2003 Webby Award winner for best news site wasn't dreamed up by marketers looking for a way to extend the ubiquitous Google brand. It started with one avid news consumer trying to manage the flood of information in the days after Sept. 11, 2001.

Krishna Bharat, Google's principal scientist, turned to Google's search engine to create a news portal organized like a newspaper but constantly updating as news sites posted stories.

With his personal news tool, Bharat could read headlines from around the world at a glance, and with a click he could follow the links to the source.

His news portal quickly became an in-house favorite at Google. The search company started a headline service later that year and posted the first beta of Google News in spring of 2002.

(...)

Users can search the site and sort the news by date or relevance but have no say in the news front or section-front layouts.

Bharat's tool has taken flak for how it defines news -- including press releases, for example, and excluding many blogs -- and for the mistakes his algorithm can make in playing or selecting news.

Despite these criticisms, the site has become one of the best tools available for keeping tabs on running stories or watching news unfold beyond the usual-suspect array of news sites. The recent addition of breaking news alerts has increased its utility.

It's not the only news search engine, but it is a popular favorite: Google News had 2.24 million unique visitors in August, making it the 17th most popular general news site, according to comScore's Media Metrix.

The following is an edited transcript of a series of phone interviews and e-mail follow-ups with Bharat. Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesman, participated in the interview process.

[ OJR = Online Journalism Review, KB = Krishna Bharat — SnowCrash ]

(...)

OJR
So you'd had this experience with journalism before with how to use people's actions and interests to determine the appearance. With Google News, you went in the other direction.

KB
I went in the other direction because I was not looking at users. I was looking at news content coming from different sources trying to understand what was common between this article and that article. Were they talking about the same event? How could I detect the fact that they're talking about the same event? Even if they used the same words but had different points of view and one was technical and one wasn't, one addressed the common man and one was business-oriented. These are all the challenges. You remember the way it came about?

OJR
Yes, but not everybody reading this may remember.

KB
After Sept. 11, when all the newspapers were recording who, what, when, where -- there was a big question of why. Why did this happen? What's going to happen in the future? A lot of people were spending a lot of time looking for news, and I was one of them. All the servers were slow and it took a long time to find the content. Fundamentally, I wanted to build a tool that would automate this: Here's a new development, let's find all the articles that talk about this development.

OJR
How many Web sites did you start with?

KB
I started with 20; my list grew to about 200. So the first demo of 20 newspapers was the top names, and I had something that visited each newspaper every hour and checked all the content trying to find out which one was new.

OJR
How would it know what the content was?

KB
There's a whole field of study called "information retrieval," which deals with text analysis -- trying to find which documents match the query, which documents match other documents. So I drew on a lot of technical work that I knew of in order to make this happen. ? I had to bring in a lot of intuition specific to the news domain to try to bring in diverse articles.

(...)

OJR
How do you define news?

KB
Honestly, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Reporting and commentary on current events from a verifiable source. I know that's pretty broad. The thing I think is indicative of a news source is that some portion of the world believes it's a news source. Who are we to tell them it's not news? Since you asked for my personal definitions of "news" and "news source," these shouldn't be interpreted as Google News or Google Inc.'s definition. Google News has a team of reviewers who decide what should go in our crawl. I provide input but do not make the selections.

(...)

KB
I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. There's never been a more controversial time on the planet. I think it's great to be a news source at this point because there's so much hunger for news. You see a lot more diversity in the news coverage on our site than on others. I think the diversity is a mirror to the diversity of opinion there is worldwide. One of the things that makes us objective is we show all points of view. Even if you disagree with one, we give you both -- the majority and the minority point of view. The ones you don't agree with are education.

It's nice to know what the other side is thinking. You'll see left-leaning ones as much as much as you see right-leaning ones. Frankly, the software doesn't know the difference between left and right, which is good.

OJR
You could train it to if you wanted.

KB
Yes, but this is code that is set down and is on the public record. We are very proud of what we are doing.

OJR
What you're trying to do is give people a way to go into a story from as many different possible approaches as they can.

KB
Even within Google, people have different political leanings. Even if we did want to bias it, fundamentally we are committed so strongly to objectivity we couldn't possibly do it. I think no matter what political association you belong to, it's valuable to see what the other side is saying.

OJR
You have taken something that was an idea that was to have helped you and now, how does it make you feel to know that people are coming to this site during difficult times and getting what they need from it?

KB
I think it's wonderful. I think there's a profound sense of satisfaction. It's almost like this is the contingency we planned for when there's so much turmoil and difference. People are at odds with understanding each other's point of view. I think we are helping the cause of democracy.