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Googolians.net via creativecommons.org
VOICES

Happy Birthday, Google News

As Google News turns eight amidst a news industry in flux, Tom Krazit reflects on how the search engine became a news provider – and what it means for traditional media.

KRISHNA BARAT, FOUNDER and engineering head of Google News, was stuck in New Orleans at a conference in the days after September 11, 2001, and like so many others desperately searching for news about the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Not only was it hard to find the most authoritative information online, it was hard to find information from differing points of view.

“(There was) a lot of time to think about current events and news and trying to get out of there,” Bharat said in a recent interview with CNET. “I came back here and said, ‘I know how to extract content from news sites, how can I make this process of understanding much more improved?’”

It was that frustration that led to the eventual creation of Google News on September 22, 2002. It aggregated online news content from around the world and quickly became popular and controversial, as some news publishers complained about what they perceived as an attempt to draw traffic away from their own Web sites and others pondered the ranking criteria.

The rancor of that debate has quieted, but Google News is facing new challenges.

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies.

Read the full article at CNET.