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In a video explaining the evolution of Google search over the years, Google Fellow Amit Singhal tells the story of how Google News came to be:
“When September 11th happened, we as Google were failing our users. Our users were searching for ‘New York Twin Towers,’ and our results had nothing relevant, nothing related to the sad events of the day. Because our index was crawled a month earlier, and of course there was no news in that index. So we placed links to all the news organizations like CNN right on our front page saying please visit those sites to get the news of the day, because our search is failing you.”
“My friend Krishna and I were attending a conference at the time, and Krishna started thinking about the problem, saying, ‘If we could crawl news quickly, and we can provide multiple points of view about the same story to our users, wouldn’t it be amazing?’ That was the birth of Google News.”