How Google News Was Born
As a young man in India, Bharat was, in his own words, a “news junkie”. He read Indian newspapers, watched Indian Television, read Time Magazine and sat with his grandfather, who lived with his family, listening radio news reports from BBC. Recognizing that censorship and cultural issues sometimes got in the way, Bharat soon caught on to the notion that if he really wanted to understand an event, he needed to turn to multiple sources of info, particularly if the news was related with India. There were certain subjects that were just too sensitive for the Indian Media to treat openly or in full, so each week Bharat eagerly waited for Time Magazine to arrive, and became fascinated by the notion of how his grandfather kept informed about local and world events. This searching experience as a youth ultimately influenced his thinking about what he would do as a grown up.
When Bharat was a doctoral student at Georgia Tech in mid 1990s, he indulged his passion for news by developing a new type of news paper. He wanted to device a crawler (set of mathematical equations in form of computer program) which could continuously crawl the Internet, just like Google’s spiders. His plan (the start-up) was to collect news of different categories in different packages and deliver it to content loving users. The idea later developed as to help users get all relevant content at a place all categorized as per needs (In the form you see Google News today).
After graduating from Georgia Tech with his Ph.D.,Bharat moved to California and went to work for Digital Equipment in Palo Alto, where his focus included consulting for the Alta Vista Search Engine. The job increased his interest in web search, building on his background and education in information retrieval. In 1999 he joined the guys at Google, and with a fellow colleague from Digital he found Google’s research group.
Bharat relished the 20 percent rule the most at Google. The rule said that you (the employee of Google) can spend one day a week on something you, not your boss, are passionate about, and do not worry, about pedestrian matters as whether the idea could be money maker or something that could be turned into a successful product. In other words, please yourself.
On the horror day of September 11 – Bharat the “news junkie” in India; his style newspaper idea in Georgia Tech; and Google’s 20 percent rule all combined to lay the foundation of Google News.
Using Technique known as clustering, he began dividing stories into categories, ranging from world news to politics to business to sports and then watched the quantity of editorial activity that was generated by a specific story. Next, he began adjusting the rank of stories based on their origin, with greater weight to stories written by reporters for leading US newspapers and wire services, including The NY Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and Reuters. At the same time, inclusiveness was important, so no matter how big and prestigious or small and obscure a news source might be, Bharat wanted to find a way to include it.
Given the importance of updates to news and real-time nature of what he envisioned, Bharat’s formula also increased the rank of freshe stories over older news. In creating editions of his online news site, he also added relevance to mix. For example, all other things being equal, U.S. story would be of greater interest to computer users in United States than a Canadian story and vice verse.
Bharat knew he was onto something big in December 2001, when CEO Eric Schimdt droped in and passed a remark that “Google News” was a cool product.
Keeping in terms with Google practices, he received the resources necessary to take the demo and build it into something that shines online for millions of users worldwide. That meant designers who would focus on the user interface; a seasoned product manager, Marissa Mayer, to shape the product and study it from the user perspective; and a team of engineers to refine and test the software that crawled the web, ranked stories, and organized different info into a comprehensible whole. “At Google, if something is worth doing, it gets funded” says Bharat, noting that no one ever asked how the product would make money.
Google, in effect, was serving as a news broker. It didn’t pretend to own the news it was republishing, which meant the company did not necessarily need to license and pay for the news it retrieved from hundreds and later thousands of media outlets. On the other hand news portals were receiving free publicity.
Google News caught on with computer users and journalists alike, leading to new innovations such as Google Alerts, an automatic way for people to track specific topics of interest by email. (Bharat did not develop the alerts.) Millions signed up to receive the alerts, which proved invaluable to people following a particular company, issue, individual, or subject in the news. For journalists once fearful of missing a story, Google Alerts, in combination with Google News homepage and search function, made covering a beat more efficient. It also led to a greater sharing of idea, since articles from an array of sources around the world – from the leading metropolitan dailies to small-town tabloids – would be compiled and available much rapidly.
[via The Google Story (not a affiliate link)]
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