When the September 11 attacks overwhelmed online news systems and left millions unable to find coherent, multi-source coverage, Google research scientist Krishna Bharat built a solution. Using his 20% personal project time, he developed a prototype that automatically crawled, clustered, and ranked news from hundreds of sources without human editorial curation. Google News launched in 2002 and reshaped how the world consumes news, aggregating content from tens of thousands of publishers across more than 40 languages. Bharat received the 2003 World Technology Award for Media and Journalism for the invention.
