It has been ten years since Google News was launched. To be exact Google News was launched on September 22nd, 2002. Post 9-11 there was tremendous spurt in the search for online news as people scrambled to get relevant and reliable news. This is when Google began its glorious journey. It gathered news from different sources, grouped them, ranked them based on editorial merit and put them up for public consumption. All this was done in real time. This was no mean an achievement as links had to be gathered, sorted, checked, and ranked. Another thing that Google assiduously did was they presented both sides of the story and left it to the readers to form opinions. This allowed people to hear the other side out and then make balanced judgments.
Google News has grown from a single edition in a single language to 72 editions in over 30 languages. The news is collected from over 50,000 sources. Google invested heavily in technology that made this possible. Today the same technology powers Google’s news search and connects more than a billion users to the news content they are looking for.
In recent years Google has also offered features like Personalization, Local news, Authorship, Editors pick, Spotlight, and social discussions. Today Google News can be read on both desktops and handheld devices with the same ease and comfort. Google engineers are continuously challenged to collect, co-relate, group, rank, personalize, and streamline news in real time.
Just take a look at the top stories that Google News featured and you will see that right from the break of the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to President Obama’s victory to Osama’s death everything was covered. And all this happened while Google was adding new features like Video results, Local news, Living stories, FastFlip, Expandable stories, Homepage redesign, and Real-time coverage with Google+ comments.
Who can dispute the fact that Google News redefined online news in all these years of its existence? With increasing popularity of handheld devices Google is once again doing all that can be done so that viewers can have access to news on their smartphones, mobiles, or tablets. Google believes that journalism is no longer the same as before; this is an age of Open journalism, and aggregation by machines and humans.
With Google Hangouts you can not only read the latest news but you can also comment, form an opinion, and influence the way news is discussed. Google is thrilled at all these new developments and is aware of the fact that even these things will change for the better as time goes on. Google is ready to take on the challenges that time throws at it and come out a winner.
