Last week's launch of a new Google labs experimental feature - Google Fast Flip - has attracted plenty of comment already, linking as it does to the already familiar and long running debates on the relationships between newspapers, the internet, falling ad revenue etc etc. As the techcrunch post on the topic emphasises, the significance of the development has probably been slightly over-stated by some blogs/commentators - and in actual fact the feature is not THAT big a deal...
However, while such debates and speculation are certainly interesting, I'd personally like to just throw in a quick piece on the actual feature itself - which I think is really quite neat (i probably gave that away a bit with the blog title).
In essence the feature provides a quick and easy way to browse news articles from a number of different sources - as well as a direct search tool. The feature displays the first page of each story in a large thumbnail type view, with multiple stories on each row of the screen (of which there are two in the default setting). You can scroll left and right through stories and open each one that takes your fancy with a simple click.
All in all then Google Fast Flip in essence does two pretty decent things:
1. It provides a hybrid of the Google words and Google images search functions, specifically for looking for news articles. As a concept there is certainly potential for expanding these tools to 'standard' searches too and no doubt this prospect is being explored already at Google HQ...
2. It provides a great way to browse news content in a way which facilitates the discovery of alternate news sources that previously might not have been on a user's radar... Try it for yourself - simply type in a topic of interest and explore the full range of alternate blogs and news sources out there.
And that's about it for now - another nice piece of thinking from Google Labs, some cool evolution of search results presentation, and a nice new way to approach online news browsing... but certainly not the death knell for conventional media that some have been proclaiming.
Dejan Levi
