Q. We want to know about Google History to Beta launch in 2002.

Reply: Well, Google's charter is to make all the information in the world accessible. News is a very important part of information. The thing with news is that it's different with different newspapers and publishers. Nobody knows who has published what. You can get old content on the web, but news is fresh. News has its own challenges, quite different from web content. Newspapers and their readers don’t know all the news that is printed. There was an opportunity for both readers and journalists to understand what was published and what was missed. At that time the leading news sites completely missed the fact that there were multiple news avenues and choices.

Now after 9/11, many people read a whole lot of news. Most of it was online, since you just couldn’t wait for the next day’s newspapers. So, while people searched the Internet for news, they would often find the same article that they had read previously. It became a tedious process to find news that came in from different sources.

I realized that all of this could be automated. In fact that was a rather modest first ambition that I had- to automate the process of news. We wanted to build something that could access every possible newspaper online, rather than having to search every time. Then there was a generalist push- we decided to get all the topics all the time. This was by a process that we called “clustering.” We would try and get as much different news (through Google’s web crawlers) for a particular topic such as sports or politics that we called a cluster; I was able to get everything grouped by topic. Somebody pointed out that it looked like a newspaper, so we laid it out like one, adding more topics….

The demo of Google News was finally up by December 2001, three months after the project was conceptualized. In the beginning, we used news from 150 sources, and now we carry news from over 4,500 newspapers in the world. All newspapers have original content and we try to see that duplicated articles are avoided, using the story rank index. We don’t normally use wire service news, though newspapers do carry wire services reports at times. The first alpha was available on Google labs’ web suite from March 2002, and the current version was first up in September 2002.