Krishna Bharat, Google news inventor, is back at Google
Krishna Bharat, the inventor of Google News, returned to Google in July as a distinguished research scientist, working on search and news. He left Google in 2015 to join Laserlike, a machine learning software company, as an advisor. Laserlike, which was reportedly bought by Apple in early 2019.
In 2017, Bharat criticized Google’s news vetting process as “shameful and irresponsible,”after it carried feeds from 4Chan, a rightwing website, identifying the wrong person as the gunman in a mass killing in Las Vegas.
Earlier, Bharat worked at Google for 15 years, between 1999 and 2015. He was a distinguished research scientist on web search and information extraction.
He led a team that built Google News in the aftermath of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “At Google we realized that our ability to display links to the freshest and most relevant news was limited by a fundamental problem: fresh news lacked hyperlinks,” he wrote in a blog post in 2011 after Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was killed. “I realized that if Google could compute how many news sources were covering the underlying story at a given point in time, we could then estimate how important the story was,” according to a CNBC report.
Bharat’s colleague, former Google search leader Amit Singhal, told Poynter in a 2011 interview, “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. 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.”
Krishna Bharat is the founder of Google News, an automated news service aggregating more than 50,000 sources, with 72 editions in over 30 languages. Google News won the 2003 Webby Award in the news category, and Bharat received the 2003 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. In 2004 he founded Google’s R&D operations in Bangalore, India and served as its director until 2006. Before joining Google in 1999, he was a member of the research staff at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and St. Joseph's Boys' High School, Bangalore.
