Google News, a Free News Aggregator, Begins

Krishna Bharat, a research scientist at Google, created Google News in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in order to keep himself abreast of new developments. In 2014 Google News watched more than 4500 worldwide news sources, aggregating content from more than 25,000 publishers. For the English language it covered more than 4500 sites; for other languages, fewer sites were covered.

According to the Wikipedia, different versions of the aggregator were available for more than 60 regions in 28 languages, as of March 15, 2012, with continuing development ongoing. As of January 2013, service in the following languages was offered: Arabic,  Cantonese,  Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian,Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu,Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

"As a news aggregator site, Google uses its own software to determine which stories to show from the online news sources it watches. Human editorial input does come into the system, however, in choosing exactly which sources Google News will pick from. This is where some of the controversy over Google News originates, when some news sources are included when visitors feel they don't deserve it, and when other news sources are excluded when visitors feel they ought to be included. . . .

"The actual list of sources is not known outside of Google. The stated information from Google is that it watches more than 4,500 English-language news sites. In the absence of a list, many independent sites have come up with their own ways of determining Google's news sources . . . ." (Wikipedia article on Google News, accessed 10-24-2014).