Heena Sharma Blog

  Google on Tuesday announced several initiatives for Indian news industry under its Google News Initiative (GNI), including the launch of Google News Showcase , a programme to train 50,000 journalists in digital skills, and training 800 small and mid sized news organisations grow their digital ad revenue. The Google New Showcase, launched late last year, and currently active in several other countries, will show content from Indian publisher partners in English and Hindi in dedicated News Showcase panels in Google News and on Discover. Showcase will have add support for more Indian languages in the future. As part of the licensing agreements with publishers, Google will also pay participating news organizations to give readers access to a limited amount of paywalled content. From today, Google News Showcase will roll out in India with 30 news publishers including national, regional and local news organizations like The Hindu Group, HT Digital Streams Ltd, Indian Express Group,

Back in 1998, two PhD students from Stanford University launched a new search engine with a bold mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. 20 years since then, there has been no looking back and two tech nerds, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began their journey to change the internet. According to Wikipedia, Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google - the name originated from a misspelling of the word "googol" - the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. As Google turns 20 today, let's look back at what Google has been up to since 1998, and where they are headed next Google was launched in September 1998 in a garage rented in the Northern California cit