“Google News is one of the largest and most up-to-date news services online, gathering content from more than 4,500 online news sources around the world, then determining which stories are related and grouping them based on importance.

While the creation of the original articles and their publication online requires thousands of journalists, editors and other news professionals, the organization and display of stories on Google News is managed entirely by computer programs.

Google News launched in September 2002 on www.google.com. Recently, localized version of Google News were created for international markets, including Germany, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The new beta versions of Google News for these countries are available on their respective Google country domains. Other versions are in the works and should be available in the months ahead.

Krishna Bharat,
Google Principal Scientist

Krishna Bharat, the Google Principal Scientist who conceived the idea for Google News, took a moment recently to answer questions submitted by readers of the Google Friends newsletter.”

“In order to receive pings, you need to have a trackback server that receives the pings and can display the list of sites that have pinged you. Some people cannot or will not run servers, even servers that are just gussied up CGI scripts (i.e. people using BlogSpot). So, we developed No-Host Trackback to help those people out.

To use No-Host Trackback, you sign up for an account, add some code to your template, and you're ready to go. As an added bonus, No-Host Trackback will also allow you to have remotely hosted comments. No-Host Trackback is fully skinnable. And of course, it's free.
No-Host Trackback is currently being beta tested. You are welcome to sign up for an account, but we are limiting the test to just 25 users. If you are limited in time or patience, wait a month or so and we'll be ready for you then.”