Krishna Bharat, the founder and engineering head of Google News, recently said that the computer-generated aggregated news site is expanding its customization options for non-English readers, the Japan Times Online reported.

The article reported Bharat said in an interview he expects the site's news personalization and other features to become more widely available for non-English readers, including Japanese, sometimes this year.

"Google currently offers more extensive options for English readers to personalize their news site by enabling them to create sections that cluster together stories closely matching their interests", Japan Times underlined.

Google News was created by Bharat in 2002 with the intention to allow readers find news from different sources, not just Western media but from all over the world.

The site now has 72 editions in 30 languages and currently draws news from more than 50,000 sources, "ranking them according to the company's algorithm, which checks factors such as originality and timeliness of the story, the number of citations, quality of the source and other signals that determine overall quality", the article reported.

Whether Google News is helping or hindering newspapers is a long-debated question.
Some publishers resent it because they fear that potential readers skim Google News and feel informed rather than going directly to the newspapers' websites.

However, Google argues that it benefits news publishers. At an event held by the London's Frontline Club in August 2010, whose topic was "Google: friend or foe for news publishers", Peter Barron, Head of PR and Communications for Google, said that Google News sends a billion clicks a month to the news websites, globally, and in financial terms this shared revenue is worth over $5 billion a year", the EJC reported.

Moreover, Google News' senior business manager Josh Cohen said that Google is simply helping pushing content to Web sites, which is ready for them to monetize. The editorial integrity of the content is preserved, Cohen said, because the algorithm used to rank stories look for the most "original content".

The underlying idea of providing news from different sources to foster the importance of diversity in news reporting is shared by other news organizations such as WorldCrunch, whose mission is to provide English translations of news articles from around the world. "What we're looking for is to provide a global view of the world," co-founder Jeff Israely told the Editors Weblog, explaining that global news should always be relevant in a local sense also.

Will the improved Google News service in other languages lead to more strained relations with publishers? Or will it in fact drive more traffic to news sites?

Sources: Japan Times, Google News Blog, EJC, MediaPost