Google News is a free news aggregator provided and operated by Google Inc, selecting most up-to-date information from thousands of publications by an automatic aggregation algorithm.
Launched in September 2002, the service was tagged as a beta test for over three years until January 2006.The initial idea was developed by Krishna Bharat.
Introduced as a beta release in March 2002, the Google News service came out of beta on January 23, 2006. Different versions of the aggregator are available for more than 60 regions in 28 languages (as of March 15, 2012), with continuing development ongoing. Currently, service in the following languages is 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.
The service covers news articles appearing within the past 30 days on various news websites. In total, Google News aggregates content from more than 25,000 publishers. For the English language, it covers about 4,500 sites; for other languages, fewer. Its front page provides roughly the first 200 characters of the article and a link to its larger content. Websites may or may not require a subscription; sites requiring subscription are noted in the article description.
The layout of Google News underwent a major revision on May 16, 2011.
On July 14, 2011, Google introduced "Google News Badges" and split up the Sci/Tech section into two sections: Science and Technology.
