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, and Hebrew.

To quell any charges of reporting bias, 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. 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."

The service covers the news articles that appeared within the past 30 days on news websites in the language concerned, from various countries; for the English language it covers about 4,500 sites, for other languages less. It provides around the first 200 characters and links to the full article. Some of these websites require a subscription; in that case this is noted in the Google News summary of their articles.

In March 2005, Agence France Presse (AFP) sued Google for $17.5 million, alleging that Google News infringed on its copyright because "Google includes AFP’s photos, stories and news headlines on Google News without permission from Agence France Presse."* * It was also alleged that Google ignored a cease and desist order, though Google counters that it has opt-out procedures which AFP could have followed but did not. Google has since ceased aggregating AFP's stories.

Google News quietly left its beta phase in January 2006.