Google News, a computer-generated free news site provided by Google Inc that aggregates stories worldwide, is expanding its customization options for non-English-language readers this year, the creator of the news service said recently.<\/p>\n
In an interview with Kyodo News, Krishna Bharat, who is Google\u2019s distinguished research scientist, said he expects the site\u2019s news personalization and other features to become more widely available for non-English readers sometime this year.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018Everything will come to non-English languages including Japanese,\u2019\u2019 Bharat said. Google currently offers more extensive options for English readers to personalize their news site by enabling them to create sections that cluster together stories closely matching their interests.<\/p>\n
Bharat said personalization of news is among the company\u2019s top priorities for the year, along with enhancing the speed with which the stories get delivered through a variety of mobile and non-mobile devices.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018The web is very slow\u2014the click on a link takes eight to 10 seconds,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u2018\u2018The new model that is emerging is that people read news in a stream, it\u2019s coming to you\u2026almost like watching TV. You\u2019re able to go from story to story and can read multiple articles about the same story in a very intuitive way,\u2019\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
Google News was rolled out in September 2002, shortly after the first anniversary of the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Bharat, an Indian native, created the news site out of his frustration in trying to find coverage of the tragic event from different sources\u2014not just Western media but from all over the world.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018I feel we\u2019ve made a lot of progress,\u2019\u2019 Bharat said. \u2018\u2018We had just the one English edition initially\u2014now we have 72 editions in 30 languages\u2014it\u2019s been a lot of international expansion,\u2019\u2019 he said of the service, which won the prestigious Webby Award in the news category in 2003.<\/p>\n
The site currently draws news from more than 50,000 sources around the globe, ranking them according to the company\u2019s algorithm, which checks factors such as originality and timeliness of the story, the number of citations, quality of the source and other signals that determine their overall quality.<\/p>\n
Bharat, who grew up in the Indian city of Bangalore, recalled that one of his fondest memories from his childhood was sitting with his grandfather\u2014an avid listener of the BBC World Service\u2014and hearing him talk about global events.<\/p>\n
Bharat said the experience of learning of events happening around the world, including those in his native country, through a foreign broadcaster taught him the importance of diversity in news reporting.<\/p>\n
Bharat said he would love to see, sometime in the future, American readers getting direct and instant access to Japanese and other foreign-language news articles by reading translated versions of them.<\/p>\n
He said such exchanges have happened to some extent for English-language readers, with leading Japanese papers, for instance, producing English versions. He said the American press should try to reciprocate by publishing their articles in non-English languages.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018That might be a way to bridge the debates that are happening in countries which are not talking to each other as much as they could,\u2019\u2019 Bharat said. \u2018\u2018I think it will be good for global harmony to have more access to newspapers internationally,\u2019\u2019 he said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Google News, a computer-generated free news site provided by Google Inc that aggregates stories worldwide, is expanding its customization options for non-English-language readers this year, the creator of the news service said recently. In an interview with Kyodo News, Krishna Bharat, who is Google\u2019s distinguished research scientist, said he expects the site\u2019s news personalization and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}