Who developed the initial idea for Google News?

Krishna Bharat developed the initial idea for Google News.

Bharat, a Google research scientist, conceived the service after the September 11, 2001 attacks. He wanted a better way to follow rapidly changing events and compare coverage from many news organizations. That idea became an automated news-aggregation system rather than a conventional newspaper-style newsroom.

Google released a beta version of Google News in September 2002. The service organized links from many publishers and presented headlines and summaries, helping readers see multiple reports about the same developing story. Google later released an official version of the service in January 2006.

The question asks who developed the initial idea, not who later managed Google or helped expand its products. Susan Wojcicki, Amit Singhal, and Marissa Mayer were all prominent Google executives, but they are not credited with originating Google News. Bharat continued to be closely associated with the project and led work on systems that automatically indexed news sites in multiple languages.