Bangalore: Google News, the free news aggregator, launched in September 2002, has turned 10 years old. The service, launched after the September 11 attacks was inspired by the widespread interest in news during attacks. Google invested in technology to allow people search and browse news relevant to them.

The service was founded by Krishna Bharat, a distinguished scientist at Google. Google’s algorithm collected the news in real time, grouped articles by stories and ranked stories.

In the ten years of its existence, Google News has grown to a major destination of news seekers. It connects around 1 billion unique users to news content per week. It displays opposing viewpoints next to each other, allowing readers to "hear arguments on both sides of an issue and gain a more balanced perspective,” wrote Bharat in his blog. The service is now available in 72 editions in 30 languages, and draws from more than 50,000 news sources.

According to Bharat, “in the last 10 years, Google had experimented and added lot of useful features to the Google News like local news, spotlight, Editor’s pick and has embraced mobile, along with evolutionary designs.

In his blog post related to Google News’ birthday, Bharat had displayed the top stories from each year which include Iraq war in 2003 and death of Michael Jackson in 2009.