- Google News creator Krishna Bharat recently returned to the company after 4 years to work on Search and News
Krishna Bharat — the creator of Google News — recently returned to the search giant after four years to work on Search and News. Google confirmed this news with CNBC.
Bharat previously worked at Google for 15 years (1999 and 2015). And Bharat previously led a team that created Google News in the aftermath of 9/11.
In an interview with Poynter in 2011, former Google search head Amit Singhal said that he was attending a conference with Bharat during 9/11. And when that tragic event occurred, Google lacked relevant results related to what happened.
One of the fundamental problems at the time was that at the time Google’s ranking depended on links from other authors on the web and fresh news “was too fresh to accumulate such links. A new importance signal was needed.” So Bharat oversaw the creation of the “Storyrank” algorithm, which was based on how Google could compute how many news sources were covering the underlying story at a given point in time.
“This insight led to a ranking that combined the editorial wisdom of many editors on the web in real-time. In addition to making search better it led to Google News – a display of stories in the news ranked automatically by an algorithm. This also allowed us to group news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place,” wrote Bharat in a blog post back then.
Along with serving as a distinguished research scientist on web search at Google, Bharat was also the founder and first director of Google’s R&D branch in Bangalore.
After Bharat left, he became a founding advisor for Laserlike (reportedly acquired by Apple earlier this year). And Bharat was also a founding advisor at Grokstyle.
