Google News extracts articles from more than 4,500 sources worldwide, then automatically clusters them into groups by subject matter. Krishna Bharat, the Google Senior Research Scientist who conceived of the idea, answers questions about the history and future of Google News.
“Relevance is determined by information retrieval techniques that look at the distribution of words in the article and surrounding pages on the web,” he says. “If the article matches the query well it is deemed relevant and gets a high score. Other factors include the importance of the source, timeliness of the article, and importance of the news story, relative to other stories in the news currently.”
