Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc. The Google News website was introduced as a beta release in April 2002. The service came out of beta on 23 January 2006. There are different versions of the aggregator for more than 20 regions in 12 languages, with more added all the time. Currently, service in the following languages is offered: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (traditional and simplified characters), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Norwegian and Swedish.
To quell any charges of reporting bias, Google claims that the service is fully "automated" with no human editors. However the sources included are determined by human review, and their selection has come up for criticism. The first major issue came in 2003 in regard to the inclusion of Indymedia sources, after an anti-semitic posting was included with Indymedia's syndicated articles. Google received complaints, and decided to remove all Indymedia postings, claiming it had not sufficient editorial controls to justify its inclusion as a news source. Indymedia's issues were shortly resolved and Google News includes a limited number of its postings. In March 2005 attention was called to Google's inclusion of the white supremacist National Vanguard magazine, and the resulting controversy forced Google to remove that site from the service. In another case, Google was criticized for not including sources which are censored in China. In the official Google Blog on 9/27/2004, the Google Team wrote: "For users inside the People's Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country."
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