When the average internet surfer can't find the news he wants, he simply gives up. But when Krishna Bharat faced that problem after New York's most famous twin towers were reduced to a rubble by terrorists on September 11 in 2001, he didn't click his browser shut in frustration. Instead, the computer engineer from IIT Madras and Georgia Tech and Principal Scientist at Google, set about creating a search engine that would not just sort and group news stories, but automatically update them every 15 minutes. With that was born the now popular Google News, which won the Webby Awards (internet's equivalent of the Academy Awards) in the news category for 2003. The 34-year-old Bharat, son of an IAS officer, also got Google its first patent, granted for a Hilltop Algorithm he developed. Recently in Bangalore to set up Google's India r&d centre, the soon-to-be-multi-millionaire (courtesy Google's IPO) Bharat spoke to BT's Venkatesha Babu. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

The tale of how Google News was created is now a part of the web folklore. Can we hear it one more time, but from the horse's mouth?

Immediately after 9-11, I realised that it would be useful to have news reports from multiple sources on any single given topic assembled in one place. With thousands of competing news sites on the internet, how can somebody get the latest news about a subject in one single place? Nobody has the time to trawl through the labyrinths of the internet to get informed coverage from a wide range of perspectives. How do you manage a flood of information to pick and choose what is relevant to you? It would be time consuming to flip through one web page after another, scan and then click on umpteen number of hyperlinks, and battle with multiplying ads just to read a particular story.

Assembling all these under one single site seemed sensible. But no single human being or even a batch of them can do this job. The process of selecting stories and bunching them together from credible sources could thus be best accomplished through automation. So I wrote this algorithm that trawls the news websites and clusters related stories. I felt this could be best done by mathematics. The algorithm functions like a librarian or clipping service, by searching out, matcing, and collecting articles based on one's reading interest.

"Two things are key in Google News: Diversity of opinion and impartiality, as it is completely automated''

That is how Google News came into being. Since it is an automatic process, it updates every 15 minutes and does this 24x7. When we go home, it does not mean Google News stops updating. When we initially tested this in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the internal feedback I received was tremendous. Today, the site is a news portal organised more like a newspaper updated continuously as news websites post new stories or update them. We started off with 20 sites. Today, Google News covers 4,500 credible news sources. Google News is a force for democracy because of the diversity of opinion it offers (on the same subject).

This was not your first attempt at organising news, right?

Yes. Earlier even as a graduate student I was interested in selection of news online and personalising it. At the Krakatoa Chronicle, I had tried it. So, probably I was always interested.

Even earlier, there were news search engines like that of Alta Vista and...

None as comprehensive and none certainly the way Google News is, nor (any) covering as many sources as we do.

The way you pitch it, it sounds like Google News is the future of journalism.

(Laughs) It's presumptuous to say Google News will be the future of journalism itself. It will be part of the future of journalism.

News untouched by human hands. Should online editors worry about their jobs?

That is not true. We are just a hub for news. We are a content aggregator. Our technology trawls through the web to find the most appropriate content and display it according to relevance to the users. It was not intended to say that editors don't have a role. We just assemble news from multiple sources. News written by thousands of journalists like you. No single editor or a bunch of editors could have done what our technology does. You and other journalists are valued for the opinion, the perspective that you bring to an issue. That does not change. Automation does not mean that human editors become redundant; they just play a different role. In fact, the search avoids bias by selecting all articles that are determined relevant by the mathematical grouping, and not just what a human editor would believe in.

"Larry and Sergey are aware of India's potential. We will be doing R&D work in India''

If half of the web search traffic goes through Google or your news site has a couple of million unique visitors, you are playing the role of a gatekeeper in segregating news sources. You have power. What is news to you and how do you decide who should be in or out?

Google News is objectively created, not opinionated. It reflects the view of many editors who create the content on the sites Google trawls. Two things are key in Google News: Diversity of opinion and impartiality, as it is completely automated. Relevance is determined by information retrieval techniques that look at the distribution of words in the article and surrounding pages on the web.

Two years after it was launched for public use (in September 2002), it still has a beta tag hanging on to it. Why?

We at Google like to continuously tweak things till we have perfected it. This is a work in progress. We continuously seek feedback and based on it, improve things to make it more relevant to its users.

Since you are a content aggregator, are there legal issues if the site were to monetarily benefit from somebody's else content? Has any news site objected?

Till now, we have not had this issue. Actually, we might be driving traffic to sites, which a browser did not even know existed. In fact, they might be benefiting because of Google News (smiles). In one or two cases, when some of them have approached us, we explained to them how we go about the entire process, and they have gone back satisfied. If somebody wants us to remove them from our list, we will consider it.

Any plans to monetise Google News or include paid content like, say, a press release on a company?

I am only interested in technology. Once that is done, it is not my concern anymore. There are other people within Google who will be examining how Google might benefit out of the work we do. However, at this point it is not something I lose sleep over.

In several cases like the Wall Street Journal or even Business Today, the website can be accessed either by a subscriber or by a paying surfer. What happens when paid content becomes the norm?

I don't think this will happen. The bulk of news would still be available for free. But even if Business Today's own site, for example, has a premium paid content section, as long as they allow us to see and access it, they can then clearly charge the end user whatever they deem fit and if he is ready to pay for it. It is a win-win for everybody.

Tell us about your India plans.

Apart from our Japan, Zurich, and our Mountain View centres, we wanted to set up an R&D centre in India. Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin) are aware of India's potential. A number of people among Google's 1,900-odd employees are of Indian origin, including me. We will be doing fundamental research and development work in India. This decision to set up an R&D centre in India was taken sometime in the latter half of last year. We were here for a reconnaissance trip in December and after visiting various cities and hearing pitches from state governments, we zeroed in on Bangalore because of the talent available here. We have taken a 15,000-sq ft facility in the city from which we will be operating.

The R&D centre will be on par with any other in the world. Unlike some other companies, we will not use Indian operations for low-end work like testing, quality assurance or low-end programming. Our aim is that the next Google or Google News must come out of India. The bar we have set for ourselves here is very high. Some of us have been sent here to set up the India development centre. Anybody recruited here if he or she does not feel like working in India, can move to any of our centres and vice versa. We are not looking at recruiting in hundreds. Currently, we are just around a team of 20 or so, and we are looking for people who are at the very cutting edge. We want creative thinkers, problem solvers.

I believe Google plans to open another centre in Hyderabad...

Yes, yes, we will be having a customer support centre more like a BPO-type operation based out of Hyderabad. But that is of a different type altogether. In Bangalore, we will be doing basic research, not customer support. Unfortunately, we have realised that there is a lot of hype surrounding Bangalore. While there is a lot of talent available, we want the very best in our category. We want the Indian R&D centre to be on par with the best of the rest across the world.