Google on Monday unveiled an experimental feature designed to let people scan news on its Web site as quickly as someone flipping through stories in a newspaper or magazine.
“For many years our president, Larry Page, has been telling us that browsing content on the Web is very slow and we need to figure out how to make it faster,” said Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News, noting it can take 10 seconds to move from one Internet story to another because of all the images that need to be loaded onto the pages.
As a result, he said, “we’ve lost something in that transition from print to online.”
The answer, Google hopes, is a new feature dubbed Fast Flip, which can be accessed at fastflip.googlelabs.com. It lets people click an arrow on the right hand side of the page to quickly browse news posted by more than three dozen participating publishers, ranging from Seventeen, Slate and Newsweek to The New York Times, The Washington Post and TechCrunch.
Google said a mobile-phone version of Fast Flip also can be accessed by the iPhone and devices powered by Google’s Android mobile-operating system.
When using the feature, “it literally feels like you are flipping the page,” Bharat said.
In exchange for agreeing to let their news be posted on Fast Flip, the publishers will receive a portion of any revenue generated by advertisements appearing there, too, said Bharat. He declined to disclose the precise amount the publishers will receive, but said, “the bulk of the revenue would go to them. One of the goals is to increase the amount of news people are scanning as well as the number of ads.”
Bharat said the site will post news stories up to about a month old and be linked from Google’s traditional news site, which will not otherwise be affected by the change. Unlike Google News, which offers breaking news from a wide variety of sources, Fast Flip “is mostly for longer shelf-life content, the kind of content you want to recommend to other people.”
As such, Fast Flip will have features that people can click to recommend stories to others. In addition, Google said Fast Flip takes clues from the news selections people make to show them similar content.
Google, which is inviting comments on Fast Flip, plans to decide soon whether it’s worth keeping and perhaps deserves more prominent display, Bharat said.
Contact Steve Johnson at 408-920-5043.
